One of the most frightening feelings to experience is strict anxiety. This is the type of anxiety that doesn’t feel like it’s letting go. So you don’t feel like you can breathe, and you don’t feel like you can talk and you don’t feel like you can move because of the sheer weight of the anxiety on your shoulders. It can be frightening because it’s not just about feeling worried about something in life. This is why it’s important to learn how to ground yourself during an anxiety attack.
Anxiety is so much more than just daily worries. It’s a complex cocktail of emotions that smash together to make you feel paralyzed. Anxiety roots itself in life pressures, stress, or even underlying mental health conditions. So finding the right anxiety disorder treatment is important. No matter what it is that’s causing your anxiety or what’s at the root of any of it. We’ve put together some simple techniques to help you to manage your anxiety and ground yourself in the moment as you are feeling it.
What does an anxiety attack look like?
Anxiety attacks feel different for each individual person. They can feel overwhelming and frightening, and symptoms could include anything from a rapid heartbeat to shortness of breath. Everyone experiencing an anxiety attack feels it slightly differently to the next person, but most people have that sense of losing control or feeling quite detached from their reality. If you’ve noticed your heart has sped up and your thoughts are out of control, you may be having an anxiety or a panic attack. The best way to know what you’re truly experiencing is to look at the length of the attack, because panic attacks usually last less than an hour. Anxiety attacks often don’t have an obvious trigger. The best way to go forward in combating anxiety attacks is to try and ensure that the anxiety itself stays in check. We’ve put together some tips to help.
Learn how to belly breathe
It’s simple, but it’s an effective way to help you to ground yourself during an anxiety attack. Putting one hand on your chest and the other on your stomach, you should breathe in through your nose, ensuring that your belly rises up more than your chest. You then exhale slowly through the mouth, and you repeat this as often as you need to.
Stretch and move your body
One of the biggest things about an anxiety attack is that you will feel a buildup of adrenaline in your body. Stretching isn’t just for before or after a workout because it can relieve tension in the body caused by anxiety too. Neck, shoulder and back stretches are very simple and they can release pent up tension and give you that renewance of well-being. Movement helps you to push the adrenaline out of your body, which can help you to lessen the feeling of the anxiety attack and ground yourself in that moment.
Lean into guided imagery
You may not have heard of this before, but if you imagine yourself in a simple, serene setting such as a forest, a beach, or even a calming scene from your favorite book, you’ll be able to involve all of your senses. Think about what you can see, touch, smell, hear and taste during that scene. If you can immerse yourself in a very detailed mental image like this, you can feel very soothing and it can make you feel like you’re more in control. It can also be very calming for lingering anxiety. Soundscapes can also help you with this one if you can’t picture anything in your head. If you can listen to something that makes you feel good or look at a picture that makes you feel good, it can help.
Practice meditation
Mindfulness meditation can really help with anxiety by training the mind to focus on that present moment. This reduces the impact of stress and interrupts that cycle of worry and that cycle of fear. Sometimes trying to remember every single helpful tool like these can really feel overwhelming, and that’s why it’s important to think about how you can calm that anxiety attack as you go.
Progressive Muscle relaxation
Sometimes the best way that you can stop an anxiety attack from growing is to move your mind away from that feeling of panic. You can do this by moving your body and practicing progressive muscle relaxation will help. This is where you focus on relaxing every group of muscles and that can help you to dispel the anxiety pumping through you. You isolate different muscle groups in this practice and then tense them and then relax them. Some practices will have you start with your toes and others will have you start with your head.
Practice visualization techniques
One effective technique for calming an anxiety attack is safe place visualization. Close your eyes and take deep breaths. You then visualize a peaceful place that you love and engage all of your senses. You keep breathing deeply as you visualize it, focusing on the image rather than on the anxiety feeling. It’s a very quick technique. It can help you to push yourself down during the attack.
Get in the bath
Water immersion can make a massive difference when you’re feeling anxious. It can feel like a mini vacation for your anxious mind because the warm water eases the muscular tension and envelops you to make you feel like you are in a submerged area, which you are. If you don’t have the option of a bath, splashing water on your face can help you to slow your heart rate down too. You can then focus on that sensation of water against your skin rather than your thoughts running away with you.
Countdown from 5
One of the best grounding techniques that you can use is the 54321 rule. It’s a technique used to focus your mind and body on the present moment, and you use it during the anxiety attack to bring yourself back to baseline. You look for five things that you can see and four things you can touch before looking for three things. You can hear two things you can smell and one thing you can taste. When you practice this technique, you connect the sensors together and ground yourself in the present moment, and this can relieve the symptoms of an anxiety attack.
Crank up the music
In a similar fashion to movement and stretching, cranking up the music and having a dance party is a great way to help yourself ground during your anxiety attack. Music has the power to shift your mood in an instant. You can create a playlist of songs that calm you down and make you feel centered. If you don’t have your own, the Calm app or even Spotify can give you a range of soothing sounds and music that are designed to ease your mind when it’s in an anxious state.
Anxiety is not something to laugh at, and it’s not a joke. In fact, it’s one of the worst feelings that you could possibly have because it makes you feel like you’re out of control. Taking the time to learn what will ground you the most is going to help you to feel as present in the moment as you can be. Anxiety doesn’t have to take over your life now that you have the tips to ground yourself during an attack.
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