For anyone who has been advised to try grounding techniques, and found that they didn’t work.
Why standard grounding tools aren’t for everyone
If you have ever experienced acute overwhelm, panic, or dissociation (feeling detached from your body and untethered from reality), you have most likely been offered advice on using grounding techniques.
One of the most common techniques is five-senses grounding: name five things you can see, four you can feel, three you can hear, two you can smell, and one you can taste. On paper, it sounds practical, and for many people, it’s useful. For others, the exercise falls flat, or might even accelerate the panic it was meant to soothe.
Generic advice can fail specifically because it’s generic. It seems to be based on the assumption that we all possess a uniform set of sensory processing mechanisms, ignoring physical differences, sensory impairments, or neurological variations. It’s also not always the case that an activated nervous system wants more input.
If you have a sensitive neurotype or a system that has experienced trauma, sensory stimulation is often the problem, rather than the solution. When you are already overstimulated, scanning a chaotic environment for sights and sounds adds more data to a system that is already struggling to process the load. In those moments, what you need is likely to be containment and less sensory input.
Grounding is not a moral test, and finding that popular techniques don’t work is not a personal failing. It means that generic exercises don’t tend to reflect how different nervous systems experience safety.
In the midst of the many storms in the world right now, it's important to be able to pause and put anchors in place, and to find places of safety in which we can rest and recover before braving the elements again.
Three material anchors
When looking for approaches that work with, rather than against our systems, trauma specialist Babette Rothschild outlines three distinct somatic tools in her work on trauma recovery: oases, anchors, and safe places. Each offers a different way to steady the autonomic nervous system – the network regulating our involuntary stress and survival responses – that don’t rely on additional sensory input.
1. Oases: Active, absorption-based relief
An oasis is an engaging activity that requires your focused attention. Crucially, it cannot be something you can perform on autopilot. If you can do the activity while your mind cycles around your worries, it won’t work as an oasis.
Knitting only works as an oasis if you are following a new, complex pattern; playing an instrument only works if you are learning a piece of music you do not already know by heart. The task must demand enough cognitive presence to interrupt rumination, giving your conscious mind a break from spiralling. By combining focused concentration with an activity that has positive associations, an oasis signals to your nervous system that it is safe to down-regulate.
2. Anchors: Contact with material reality
An anchor is not an abstract visualisation or an internal state of mind. By definition, a somatic anchor must exist in material reality. It is a real object, an actual place, or a specific person that offers a felt sense of stability. Choosing something you associate with safety, and considering ways to connect with your anchor are important steps to take before you need to use it.
An anchor might be the solid weight of a ceramic mug between your palms, the rough grain of a wooden table beneath your fingers, or a grounded friend whose presence helps you breathe lower in your belly. In moments of panic or detachment, finding a way to connect with an anchor can pull you out of internal alarm and tether you back to physical, here-and-now reality.
3. Safe Places: Memories held in the body
A safe place is a specific type of internal anchor, but unlike standard guided imagery, it works best when connected to a real, lived experience rather than an imagined fantasy.
It is a place where you have physically felt at ease in the past – a particular corner of your garden, a quiet bench overlooking the sea, or a familiar room. The technique relies on evoking somatic markers: the physical sensory memory of that space. What was the exact colour of the light? What did the air smell like? What was the texture of the seat beneath you, or the sound of the wind? Calling these sensory markers to mind allows your body to borrow the physical calm of that memory, releasing muscular tension and helping to signal to your autonomic nervous system that you’re safe.
The boundary between recovery and compliance
‘You cannot breathe your way out of patriarchy. You cannot cold plunge your way out of structural oppression. You cannot meditate, journal or yoga your way out of conditions that were designed to dysregulate you.’
Ailey Jolie
There is an essential boundary to draw here. Somatic tools are designed to help you recover agency, not to pacify you.
When living through political instability or systemic injustice, your autonomic nervous system is not broken because it feels alarmed. It is responding rationally to an unsafe environment. Too often, popular wellness culture weaponises the concept of ‘nervous system regulation’ to pathologise healthy outrage and encourage compliance. There is a crucial difference between stepping out of an incapacitating freeze response and training yourself to become quiet and compliant.
Regulation does not mean erasing grief, anger, or moral disgust. It means ensuring that those legitimate responses do not lock you into paralysis or burnout.
When the world feels intensely destabilising, the three anchor statements I return to are:
-This is a healthy reaction to an extremely unhealthy situation, but I do not have to get stuck in overwhelm.
-Connection is a way out of feeling isolated and powerless.
-My body has wisdom to offer, and I can work with it to stay safe and connected to my power.
Tending to our nervous systems doesn’t mean we need to look away or maintain business as usual. It’s about keeping ourselves resourced enough to stay in the work.
The sweet spot
Finding this balance is not about arriving at a permanent state of calm. In turbulent times, perpetual calm would be an unnatural, dissociated state.
Instead, the work is finding that elusive sweet spot: suspended somewhere between getting immobilised in freeze, attempting 'business as usual', and burning yourself out by shouldering the entire burden alone.
Grounding is not an off-switch for reality. It’s a set of practical, material pegs driven into the ground to stop the tent blowing away in high winds. You don’t need to master complex meditations or force yourself through sensory rituals that stress out your body. You only need one or two tangible anchors that hold you in the room for long enough to catch your breath, unclench your jaw, and decide what to do next.
Working Together
If you are struggling with sensory overwhelm, chronic freeze responses, or the exhaustion of carrying heavy work in an unstable world, somatic practice can help you build anchors that actually hold.
Explore 1:1 support on my Coaching page, learn how breath can calm your nervous system on my Breathwork page, or book a free discovery call to discuss where we might start.