How to Stay Grounded During Stressful Times

Over the last ten thousand years, our brain’s fear response hasn’t evolved very much. Whether you’re facing a dangerous snake, or you perceive your boss to be a dangerous snake of a different kind, your brain will process those fears the same way, sending your body into “fight”, “flight”, or “freeze” mode. A response once reserved for life-threatening circumstances is now used frequently throughout our daily lives, even though the majority of our triggers aren’t quite as life-threatening as a poisonous snake or a hungry tiger.

While our modern-day stresses tend to lean less towards animal predators, and more towards things like deadlines, bills, and sudden life changes, it is still so important to recognize how fear and stress affect our bodies, and how to manage it with daily mindfulness and grounding exercises.

Why is feeling grounded and mindful so important?

When we are being mindful in our daily lives and in our interactions, it can have a profound effect on how we react to, and perceive our experiences. 

Let’s say you’ve had a really tough day at work. When you get home, you get into a disagreement with your partner or roommate over whose turn it is to unload the dishwasher. Without having practiced mindfulness, you may lash out unnecessarily because your emotions have piled up without you really realizing it. Your reaction is harsh in proportion to the event that supposedly set it off, purely because your emotions went unchecked the whole day.

Now, imagine a similar situation, but instead of allowing your emotions from the “bad day” to pile up throughout the day, during your lunch break, you carved out some time for mindfulness. You did a short, 10-minute mindfulness meditation, or you took a walk in a nearby park to give yourself time to reconnect to yourself, allowing yourself to get to the root of why you were having a bad day. Because you were able to acknowledge your feelings and the reason you were feeling them, you were able to keep it from overtaking your entire day.

When you get home at night and the disagreement over the dishwasher comes up, you’re able to respond without lashing out, leading to a more productive conversation and an overall better evening for everyone involved.

Especially when you need to have the inevitable, tough conversations, remaining grounded and mindful will help to ensure that your emotions don’t take over the whole show. Our emotions are tools for understanding and helping us express ourselves. When used properly, they can help us to express our thoughts and feelings effectively, leading to more productive conversations. When left unchecked, we can find ourselves having “outbursts”, that may end up clouding our true intentions for the conversation, leaving everyone involved exhausted, hurt, and/or confused. 

In the midst of a stressful situation, it isn’t always easy to remember to be mindful, but there are several simple things you can do to get grounded during these times, and I’m going to share a few of them with you here.

5 Practices You Can Do Right Now

1. Pause before reacting

When something unexpected happens, rather than speaking or reacting purely from impulse, pause for a moment. Breathe deeply, and think to yourself: Is this perceived threat actually real? Notice what this trigger is bringing up inside you. Is this event or trigger bringing up a bad past memory, or an underlying fear you have? Pausing for a moment may help you to identify why this event has triggered you, and therefore help you to react to it in a more mindful way.

2. Notice how your body is feeling throughout the day

As you go throughout your day, try to take notice of when you start showing signs of fear or stress. Does your heart rate increase drastically every time you are about to talk to a certain supervisor, or before you have to do a certain task? Take notice of at which point in your day, your mind begins to wander down the path of “what ifs” and “should haves”. 

Even if you “know” what is causing this to be a stressful time for you, (you think your job in general is stressful, for example) listening closely to your body may help you to become even more clear about what is going on, and therefore give you a better chance at making productive changes. Maybe you know that your job is stressing you out, but you didn’t know that it is a certain task that you do every day that gets the stress cycle started. 

Or maybe you are suddenly tense, easily irritated, and experiencing symptoms of anxiety, all because you learned that your mother was coming for a visit this weekend, and your relationship is a bit rocky at the moment. Noticing how our body feels in relation to the things going on in our lives helps us to decode our emotions much more effectively!

3. Practice mindfulness meditation

When practiced regularly, mindfulness meditation can help you to remain in touch with your inner world, leaving less room for guessing when things begin to feel out of balance. If you don’t practice it regularly, it can still serve as a great tool for dealing with a stressful situation that you may presently be in (although, you may find its effects to be more powerful when they’ve been built up over time!).

 For more information about mindfulness meditation, be sure to check out my video all about meditation for beginners!

4. Do a deep breathing exercise

This exercise is perfect for when you’re in the moment, and need a bit of fast-acting relief. Slow, deep breaths signal to your brain that it is time for rest and digestion. If you can, put in some headphones and play soothing music while you do it. As you would in a mindfulness meditation, just allow whatever thoughts you have to just come and go without putting energy or judgment into them. Just focus on your breath until your body feels more relaxed again.

For a quick, 1-minute breathing practice that you can do anywhere, click here.

5. Acknowledge and respect the way you feel

Even if it “isn’t a good time” to work through an emotion you’re feeling, simply acknowledging it and reminding yourself that it’s okay to feel it will help you to remain aware of what is going on in your mind and body. This awareness is what will help you to avoid builds ups and not-so-friendly outbursts. 

Next Steps

Start implementing one or more of these practices each day and begin to notice how you feel.