Grounding
Moving your attention out of your thoughts and into the room you are actually in. It takes two or three minutes and nobody can tell you are doing it.
What it is
Attention has to be somewhere. Grounding decides where.
When you are anxious, angry or spiralling, attention narrows onto the thought and keeps circling it. Grounding does not argue with the thought — it gives your attention a specific, physical job instead, and the loop loses its hold while you are busy.
Nothing about it is relaxing, and it settles nothing. What it buys you is a gap between the feeling and what you do next.
- Your thoughts are going round the same track.
- You're angry and about to reply to something.
- You feel disconnected or far away from the room.
- You're anxious and can't sit still.
- Something happened and you have to carry on anyway.
In the app
One check-in, then one exercise — not a menu to browse.
Tell Pause how you feel and it offers a single grounding exercise sized for the mood you picked. Each step appears on its own, so you are not trying to remember a sequence while you use it.
Most run for two to four minutes. When it ends, the app ends with it.
Three you can do sitting still
Contact points
Find every place your body is touching something — feet, chair, desk, sleeve — and stay with each for a couple of seconds. Pressing down a little makes the sensation easier to locate when your attention keeps sliding off it.
Nobody in the room can tell, which makes it the one for meetings.
Five, four, three, two, one
Five things you can see, four you can hear, three you can touch, two you can smell, one you can taste. The counting matters — it gives attention a job with a clear end. Go slowly; rushing is the usual reason it does nothing.
Describing the room
Describe the room silently, as though to someone who cannot see it — the light is greyer than it was an hour ago, there is a coat over the second chair. Harder than the other two, and the one that holds up when your head is genuinely loud.
There are more of these, with notes on when each one fits, in 5 grounding exercises you can do anywhere.
When something else will work better
If the loop is a decision you have not made or a thing you are afraid of forgetting, grounding will hold it off for a few minutes and no longer. Write it down first and then ground — in that order it works much better.
If your body is wound up rather than your head — heart going, chest tight — start with a longer exhale and come back to this afterwards.
Grounding, guided, in about three minutes.
Pause keeps the steps and the timing so you do not have to — one exercise at a time, then it is over.
Get Pause for iPhone