“I am grounded, supported, and safe.” Mindful Zen website
This last post in this month’s series of grounding takes you through major aspects of my grounding routine to review grounding practices and to help you envision how you would like to incorporate a grounding practice into your day. I will also discuss some challenges to incorporating grounding when you have a mental illness, and suggest possible solutions. It is important to note that grounding can be simple. Even taking five minutes a day to ground, using a practice like deep breathing, can be effective in calming the mind and body.
Grounding is key to mental health recovery because it allows you to regulate your body and activate the relaxation response, making you more resistant to the effects of stress. Whatever is happening in your life – grief, job stress, challenging mental health symptoms – grounding practices can aid in steadying your body through these tough times. It is an essential part of my compass towards recovery. In these last years of accelerated stress and changes in my life, I believe grounding tools are a key contributor to avoiding the worst of my mental health symptoms. They have given me some agency, ways to help work with my stress and to dial back the intensity of anxiety.
Grounding activities also create consistent routine in your life and can help to balance busyness, which is so important when you have a mental illness. Often when we have a mental illness, our energy and moods can fluctuate a lot. We may be impacted by medication, insomnia, hypersomnia (sleeping too much), depression, anxiety, our diets, and so forth. I will talk about these more in upcoming posts, but it’s important to understand that grounding exercises can not only promote relaxation but be key to overall regulation of your energy and mood during the day. Grounding techniques bring you back to the present and out of anxious or distressing thoughts and can give your body a reboot.
It is important to know your natural energy cycles in a day and adjust your activity (as best you can) based on this energy. Living with bipolar disorder really challenges me to look at pacing in my life, which includes how busy I keep my days, how to cope when I am tired, and how to incorporate relaxation into my time. Initially, the pattern of go full tilt with energy until I crashed was something that characterized my teens and young adulthood. Most of my episodes were precipitated by a combination of intense activity and exhaustion, which, over time, left me vulnerable to an episode.
I would say that now in my life, my pacing and energy varies. There are days that I push myself a bit too much, there are days that I don’t push myself enough, and some days I seem to get the balance right. But that’s okay. It doesn’t need to be perfect. Indicators that I get the balance right are how steady my energy is, how steady my mood feels and how well I sleep. As my life activity ebbs and flows, it can be tricky to adjust my activity-to-rest ratio accordingly.
As I mentioned in the first post about grounding, I didn’t understand grounding techniques when I was fifteen and got ill. By the time I was ill, I was in crisis, and was unable to relax enough to gain benefits of the relaxation exercises my mom was trying to help me do. My anxiety had spiraled into paranoia, and I was paralyzed by anxiety.
As I have journeyed over the past almost thirty years, I have come to value and rely on my grounding practices to help me stay well and lower the amount of anxiety that I experience. I realize that when speaking of grounding I include activities that I use to bring me present, settle a turbulent mind, generate energy, promote healing of pain and stiffness, change my mood, and help me wind down to sleep. I will transition here into my story and detailed practices of my grounding tools in my present. There are no warning triggers this week.
Journaling has been my longest-standing reflective and creative grounding technique. It allows me to explore my feelings and helps me to find answers to a problem or dilemma. Sometimes I add doodling or drawings in my journals which act as meditative agents but also help to integrate what I am writing and to draw wisdom from the nonverbal aspects of myself. I also ground by art making because the process brings me to the present, gives me a tactile experience of relaxation, and evokes positive feelings from the joy of creating.
Exercise was always something I did to release stress and increase positive feelings growing up. Throughout adulthood, I have gone through extreme times of exercise and times when I wasn’t exercising enough. I have exercised my way into exhaustion and, especially during a depression, not exercised enough. Currently I am going for consistent exercise that is sustainable. I have added yoga more consistently over the last year into my routine to create flexibility for painfully tight muscles. I have really enjoyed feeling my tension lessen, but have also enjoyed the mindful relaxation aspects of yoga. My muscles aren’t particularly flexible, but I still really enjoy this practice. Of course there are other practices that incorporate breathing, movement, energy flow, and spirituality, such as Tai Chi and Qi Gong. People experience significant benefits and healing from these activities.
As I have described in previous posts, I need a transition from an alert mind to a relaxed and sleepy one at night. I have talked about using the “54321” exercise and my visualizations that I learned from therapy. I also use guided visualizations from Spotify when I really need help winding down. I also use progressive muscle relaxation. Basically, I use this practice as I am falling asleep. It involves doing a body scan where you start at your feet and tense and relax muscles, while continuing to do this all the way up to your head. You can find a prerecorded exercise on YouTube if you want to use that as a guide.
Reading this, you may feel overwhelmed by all this activity that I am doing to relax. Right now, in my life, I am recovering from deep burnout and have scaled back work so that I have time to really practice these activities. Like I said before, even small amounts of grounding activities in the day are beneficial. If your life is very busy or you feel overwhelmed, perhaps just taking a few minutes to breathe throughout your day will help you bring calm. Your grounding can be very simple and very brief. You are the only person who knows how much grounding you need and what works best, so you’ll have to experiment.
Some other barriers might be lack of motivation, either from depression, or for other reasons. In this case, I would try to pair deep breathing with a comforting activity. So, if you are depressed but still enjoy drinking a cup of coffee, why not sit and do some breathing between sips of your beverage? Honestly, micromovements towards incorporating grounding have benefits for mental health recovery. Eventually as your mood stabilizes you can add more.
One barrier to getting full benefits from grounding is lack of consistency, which is one of my challenges. I honestly get derailed from my grounding routines by…well…life:) If my plans change my schedule from day to day, I tend to forget to do some of my grounding practices. I usually pretty immediately see changes to my mental health. I won’t sleep as well. I’ll also feel stressed or more anxious. Sometimes I will feel more tired and less motivated.
We all get out of balance. The goal here is not to be perfect, but to develop skills to manage anxiety, stress, and depression through being able to relax (and sometimes re-energize) the body. At first, grounding routines felt like a chore to me, something I rushed through, but now they are very enjoyable and essential, and I miss them when I can’t do them.
I recommend checking out some of the wellness workbooks that exist for people with lived experience. I have The Wellness Workbook for Bipolar Disorder which outlines detailed strategies for wellness through grounding and routine. On page 196, it has a chart for wellness goals which might be helpful as you are exploring mapping your mental health (Sylvia, 2015).
Okay, are you ready to dive into making some art? 🎨
Therapeutic Arts Activity
Create an altar based on the theme of self-care practices that help you ground. Incorporate a broad range of materials. Experiment with colour, design, and metaphor. Take it as an opportunity to play or deepen your self-care practice.
Materials (any of the following)
- Candles
- Shells
- Inspiration cards
- Plants
- Rocks or crystals
- Art
- Anything else that feels right
Instructions
Chose elements for your altar that remind you to ground. Either find a place in your home to display or photograph it. Use it as a reminder to incorporate grounding into your mental health recovery self-care. I hope you have fun with this activity – I did:)
Once you’ve completed this activity, here are some questions as guidelines for your personal explorations:
1. What grounding activities do you use in your life currently?
2. How did it feel to create your “grounding altar?”
3. What can help you stay committed?
4. How can you reflect on the activities and see how they might positively impact your life?
My altar is ocean-themed. The ocean has a strong pull for me, like it has for many people. I feel very grounded by the ocean. I included a shell and an art piece I had done of a whale under a full moon. I also included self-care cards which depict my love of yoga, art making, and the ocean. There is also a shell shaped as a butterfly. The butterfly represents Psyche, the goddess of the soul, it seemed fitting to include it. Our grounding practices become part of our spiritual work as they allow us to create inner time. It is hard to see in this picture because of the light but there is a glass button that says courage. Self-care requires courage. There are many things in life that can take you away from self-care so sometimes strong boundaries are needed around it.
Even if you don’t do this activity, if you have a feeling that your self-care practices need a boost, try imagining participating in an activity of self-care of your choice. Use your senses to evoke anything that will bring this activity alive in your mind’s eye. Pair this visualization with deep breathing. Can you feel your body relax?
I hope you all have a beautiful weekend ahead.
❤️❤️❤️ With care and kindness, Meegan
In the spirit of creating a community of reflection and art making, your comments are welcome. If you choose to leave a comment, it is important to know I respect your privacy. Your information will not be given, lent, rented, or sold to anyone. However, when making a comment on the site, your IP address and browser user will be collected. Please see full Privacy details on my Privacy Policy Page Privacy Policy. If you are having a mental health emergency, please take care of yourself, and call 911 or take yourself to emergency at your closest hospital.
Sources
Sylvia, Louisa Grandin, PHD. (2015). The Wellness Workbook for Bipolar Disorder. New Harbinger Publications: Oakland California.
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