5-4-3-2-1 Grounding Skill for Stress

Today’s skill is a mindfulness skill centered on grounding your nervous system. This skill may seem simple, but it taps into communicating with your autonomic nervous system, the one that controls the fight, flight, freeze, faint response. Because this part of the nervous system is not the ‘thinking’ part of the brain, you have to give it sensory information to turn off the alarm bells of stress. You might have heard of it before as the 5-4-3-2-1 method where you Name 5 things you see, 4 you feel, 3 you hear, 2 you smell, 1 you taste. You may want to turn this skill up a notch and build a Grounding Kit that you can take with you wherever you go. Be sure to put things in your kit that hit all of the senses. Some examples include some peppermint gum, essential oils, fidget toy, and headphones for example.