When anxiety hits, your mind isn't in the room with you — it's either replaying something from the past or racing ahead into worst-case futures. Grounding is the practice of pulling your attention back into the present moment, where, almost always, you're actually safe.
Barbara Spaulding, LCSW, has taught grounding techniques to clients for nearly 40 years, and in her book Anxiety and Panic: Your Path to Recovery, she offers one of the clearest, most usable versions of this exercise available — built around your five senses.
Why distraction isn't the same as grounding
It's tempting to reach for your phone, start a task, or scroll through something the moment anxiety appears. Barbara is careful to draw a line between distraction and grounding: distraction gives temporary relief but requires you to stay constantly busy to keep anxiety at bay — which is exhausting and doesn't build lasting calm. Grounding, by contrast, teaches your nervous system that you can be quiet and still and safe, which is what actually resolves anxiety over time.
The 5-Senses Grounding Exercise
This exercise, adapted from the book, works because it forces your attention into concrete, sensory, present-moment information — something your anxious mind can't argue with.
Smell: Pick up a piece of fruit and smell it. Cut it open and notice how the smell changes.
Touch: Hold a few different objects and notice their texture, weight, and temperature.
Taste: Eat slowly and deliberately during a meal. Try comparing dried fruit to fresh fruit and notice the difference.
Sight: Choose one object — a tree, for example — and look at the whole thing, then a branch, then a single leaf. If you're anxious and can't focus outward, try holding your gaze on your own finger, then your hand, then your arm, until things settle.
Hearing: Put on music and try to isolate a single instrument, as if it's the only one playing. Or, outdoors, pick one sound — a bird, traffic, conversation — and separate it from everything else.
A shorter version for when panic is already happening
When you're mid-panic, a full sensory walkthrough can feel like too much. Barbara offers a simplified version for exactly that moment: pick one object and hold your eyes on it. That's it. A single point of visual focus is often enough to interrupt the spiral long enough to bring your breathing back under control.
The "Three Words" technique
Alongside sensory grounding, Barbara teaches a technique she calls Three Words — a short, memorized phrase you repeat when anxiety spikes, chosen ahead of time so it's already familiar under stress. In the book, one client (an attorney who described his anxiety as "a thundercloud following me") chose breathe, focus, slow. Another chose breathe, safe, let go. The specific words matter less than choosing ones with real meaning to you — she recommends avoiding vague words like "calm" or "relax," since they're hard to act on in the moment, and choosing something concrete instead, like "drop" (drop your shoulders) or "quiet" (quiet the mind).
The key to making this work is practicing the words when you're not anxious, so they're already automatic by the time you need them — the same way you wouldn't want to learn CPR for the first time during an actual emergency.
Building a "safe place" in your mind
One more grounding tool from the book: creating a detailed mental safe place you can return to at will. Pick an image — a forest, the ocean, a specific room in your home — and build it out with all five senses until it's vivid enough to actually calm your body when you bring it to mind. Some people draw it, record themselves describing it, or keep a printed photo nearby. Like the Three Words technique, this works best when it's practiced regularly, not just pulled out in an emergency.
Grounding is a skill, not a personality trait
None of these techniques require you to be naturally calm or "good at meditation." They're skills, built the same way any skill is built — with repetition, in low-stakes moments, until they're available to you in high-stakes ones.
These grounding exercises are part of a larger set of 17 calm skills in Barbara Spaulding's book Anxiety and Panic: Your Path to Recovery, which also covers breath work, self-talk, and structured practice schedules for specific fears. She runs a free biweekly Anxiety Relief Zoom group — details at anxietyandpanic.net.