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We are back talking about grounding skills and ways to strengthen and resource our brain so that our brain can do it’s best, allowing us to be OUR best. Last week we talked about some basics around what grounding is and how it works. We also focused on practical and applicable strategies for physical grounding, which uses our bodies to help turn on parts of our brain that help to counterbalance our stress centre and regulate our system. Today we are going to be taking it one step further and we’re talking about mental grounding activities. 

Before we go into the practical skills, let’s pause for a minute and make sure we feel really clear on what we’re doing and why it matters – because feeling really tethered to it mattering is what will help us engage the skills rather than stay in our default patterns. 

I want you to think of your brain like a muscle. I know it’s not technically a muscle, but let’s pretend for a minute because in a lot of ways it has some parallels in how it operates. The more you use a muscle, the stronger it gets. When we need a muscle or muscle group to work for us in significant ways, we can benefit from taking time to stretch it, strengthen it, and so on. We also stand to benefit from strengthening surrounding and supportive muscle groups to help facilitate the success and sustainability of the muscle or muscle group that we demand a lot from. If we don’t carefully attend to caring for these muscle groups that we rely on, we risk injury. 

Your brain, if we can use the muscle analogy, has areas that tend to get worked out at a far higher rate than others. Our lives, from quite young, train us to be very conscientious about the future – thinking, planning, anticipating, worrying, about what comes next. We also train our brains to be highly aware of the past – reflective, learning, ruminating about what has happened so we can try to recreate what’s gone well and deflect from reliving things that haven’t gone great. These pieces of our experience, past and future, tend to activate the areas of our brain connected to our stress centre, giving it a pretty consistent workout. Add to that being in a job that is high stress and demanding, along with being in a daily life that tends to be pretty demanding in its own right, your stress centre has learned to be a pretty dominant force in your brain because it is the muscle you use most. 

Meanwhile, using it so often and asking it to lift so much of the weight of life, can lead it to being exerted to exhaustion. We risk injury, ie. mental illness and related concerns, if we don’t offer it some support. 

This is where grounding comes into play. Grounding activities, particularly mental grounding activities, help to activate your prefrontal cortex. Your prefrontal cortex is the part of your brain that is responsible for all your higher-order characteristically human capacities, like language, problem solving, rational thinking, and so on. Our prefrontal cortex is where our executive functioning lives – this is the part of us that can assess, make decisions and determine next steps. When your prefrontal cortex is working, it acts as a support system to your stress centre – when your stress centre says “time to freak out”, your prefrontal cortex, if sufficiently strong, will jump in and say, “hang on a sec, let’s assess and go from there.” The problem is that our stress centre is connected to a very long evolutionary history of keeping us safe – it jumps to conclusions and acts without consulting your prefrontal cortex. Because we have trained our stress centre to be really strong, it dominates the conversation in our mind. It calls the shots without consultation. This is why we have to train our prefrontal cortex – the more intentional we can be about working out our prefrontal cortex, the stronger a voice it will have to demand that our stress centre take a breath before reacting and allow a more balanced conversation to unfold. 

Again, if we anchor to the muscle analogy – think of your stress centre as your abs. You do a ton of crunches and sit ups and bicycles – you do this every single day and over time you get some killer abs. Now, think of your prefrontal cortex as your back muscles. If you don’t equally work to strengthen your back, having killer abs will be largely ornamental and not super functional. Strong abs without a strong back sets off your alignment, weakens your posture, and limits your ability to engage in activities with the full strength that your abs have to offer. When you value the supportive muscle groups, you support your whole self and that’s what we’re aiming for. You’ve done a great job working out your stress centre. I’m sure it is really strong – but is it helping you? Is it capable of doing what you need it to do, when you need it to do it, in a way that benefits you? My hunch is that the answer is no. My guess is that your stress centre leads you to overreact or underreact in certain situations. That it might lead you to freeze in some situations, and go overboard, exhausting it’s own reserves, in other scenarios. I would bet that it often leaves you feeling regret about how you handled something, or uncertain about what to do next. And I bet it costs you a lot of energy. Energy you likely don’t feel you have to spare. 

So, if we are going to train our brain to strengthen the prefrontal cortex to help balance out our stress centre, let’s get to it. Today we’re going to talk about 7 totally practical activities you can do, anywhere, anytime, to help with mental grounding – and yes, you’ll find these in the show notes as a quick reference if you need them after you’re done listening. Let me state that these work best when practiced and can be used whenever as a training tool. That said, these can also be fantastic tools to pull out in moments of high stress, particularly if you’ve practiced them in times of lower stress, to help turn your prefrontal cortex on and give it a vote in the decisions your stress centre is making. When people do therapy for anxiety, panic attacks, and things like that, grounding activities are some of the first things we cover as they can be really effective ways to help the brain regulate fairly quickly. 

1.      Use short term recall. Your prefrontal cortex loves to notice differences and distinctions, track things and make use of short-term recall. Try a memory game – google “spot the difference pictures” and you’ll find an endless collection of images where your brain can work to find the distinctions. Similarly, playing memory with the flip cards, or playing that game with your kids where you line up items and take a few away to see which ones are missing, can be great fun ways of strengthening your prefrontal cortex…and theirs! Also games like bop-it or simon where you have to keep track of an order can be easy to do solo or with others.

2.      Play a categories game. I often suggest to my clients that they play the alphabet game. Choose a category – fruits and veggies; singers; song titles; movie titles; Disney characters; dog breeds…legitimately it could be virtually anything, and work the category through from A-Z. Try to find at least one thing for each letter. If you get stuck, remember that the point of the activity is not to actually find something for each letter, it’s to turn on your prefrontal cortex and regulate your stress centre, so if you’re starting to get stressed that you can find a fruit or veggie that starts with x, skip it and move on. No one will ever know, you are not being tested.

3.      Use math. Your prefrontal cortex is heavily involved in all things n...