Relaxation and Grounding Strategies

Relaxation and grounding strategies

Before EMDR therapy can start to get to work on reprocessing past memories, your therapist will spend some time with you in what's known as Phase 2: Preparation and Stabilisation. The purpose of this phase is about giving you the skills and tools to ‘hit the brakes’ and bring you back to a calm place. This allows us to engage in safe and effective reprocessing work, so that you and your therapist can help you return to a steadier place, when needed.

There are a few favourite strategies that we will utilise to help give you some tools and strategies to self-regulate outside of session that will be introduced during this phase. These include relaxation strategies such as diaphragmatic breathing and progressive muscle relaxation. These help to reduce tension, slow your heart rate and improve your sense of calm and safety. Additionally, we will utilise grounding strategies that work differently again. These strategies aim to give you techniques for anchoring you to the ‘here and now’, which is especially useful during times of panic, dissociation or when flashbacks feel distressing or overwhelming.

Practising these strategies during the day, well before they're needed, means they're more readily available to you both between sessions and once reprocessing work begins. You and your therapist can also modify these, or build further personalised resources together, as part of your own preparation work.

Diaphragmatic Breathing

Also known as belly breathing, this technique encourages slow, deep breaths from the diaphragm rather than shallow breathing from the chest. It helps activate the parasympathetic nervous system, the body's built-in ‘rest and digest’ response, which can slow the heart rate and ease physical tension.

1. Find a comfortable position, sitting or lying down.
2. Rest one hand on your chest and the other on your stomach.
3. Think 5-5-5 (in for 5, hold for 5, out for 5).
4. Breathe in slowly for a count of five, noticing your stomach rise while your chest stays (relatively) still.
5. Hold gently. Again, for a count of five.
6. Breathe out slowly for a count of five, feeling your stomach fall back into place.
7. Repeat for five to ten breaths, or for as long as feels helpful. Whichever way feels more comfortable and natural to you is fine.

Progressive Muscle Relaxation

Progressive muscle relaxation (PMR) involves deliberately tensing, then releasing, a sequence of muscle groups throughout the body. It can help release physical tension in the body.

Basic procedure

Get into a comfortable seated or lying position. For each muscle group below, tense firmly (about 8/10 tight), without straining. Hold for around five seconds. Then relax for five seconds (or more). Notice the feeling of relaxation as it spreads through those muscles, before moving on to the next group. Working through the same sequence each time also means your body starts to recognise and settle into the pattern more quickly. A typical sequence works through:

1. Right fist, squeezed 8/10 tight
2. Right bicep curl
3. Left fist
4. Left bicep curl
5. Head tilted back, looking up at the roof
6. Head tilted forward, looking down at the floor
7. Shoulders lifted up toward your ears
8. Shoulders back, squeezing your shoulders together
9. Chest muscles tensed
10. Stomach muscles tensed
11. Glutes tensed, squeezed tight
12. Right leg straightened out in front of you, toes up to the sky
13. Right heel on the ground, toes up as high as possible
14. Right toes flat on the ground, heel lifted up high
15. Right toes curled under, inside your shoe or bare foot
16. Left leg straightened out in front of you, toes up to the sky
17. Left heel on the ground, toes up as high as possible
18. Left toes flat on the ground, heel lifted up high
19. Left toes curled under, inside your shoe or bare foot

Once you've worked through the whole sequence, take a moment to notice how your body feels overall, compared with how it felt when you began.

Notice 5 Things (the 5-4-3-2-1 Technique)

The ‘Notice 5 Things’ exercise is a classic grounding technique that uses your senses to bring your attention back to your immediate surroundings. This can be especially useful when anxiety, panic or distressing memories start to feel overwhelming. This technique is a favourite due to its simplicity.

1. Take a deep breath in, let it out slowly.
2. Name FIVE things you can see around you.
3. Take a deep breath in again, letting it out nice and slow.
4. Name FOUR things you can feel with your body (for example, your feet on the floor, or the texture of your clothing).
5. Take in another deep breath, again letting it out slowly.
6. Name THREE things you can hear.
7. Taking in another deep breath, again letting it out slowly.
8. Name TWO things you can smell.
9. Take in one last deep breath, let it out slowly again.
10. Finally, name ONE thing you can taste.

Colours

This is a simple and flexible grounding technique that works well almost anywhere, even in a waiting room or on public transport.

1. Pick a colour.
2. Name every object you can see in that colour.
3. Once you've exhausted that colour, choose another one and repeat.
4. Continue for a minute or two (or until settled).

Categories

This technique works by deliberately engaging your prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for logical thinking, concentration and working memory. Giving this part of the brain a specific, effortful task to focus on means it has less spare capacity left over for emotional processing, so the more reactive, emotional part of the brain can, in a sense, take a back seat for a little while.

1. Choose a category. A few examples that tend to work well:
   • Farm animals
   • Suburbs of Brisbane
   • Types of food
   • Terms related to a specific hobby (e.g. different types of fish, for those who like fishing)
   • Dog or cat breeds, if you're an animal lover
2. Name as many items in that category as you can think of.
3. If that feels too open-ended, try working through the alphabet instead, naming one item in the category for each letter (an apple, a banana, a cherry, and so on).
4. Continue for a minute or two (or until settled).

Counting Backwards in 7s

This grounding technique is the least popular but also is quite effective. Like naming categories above, counting backwards in sevens works by engaging the prefrontal cortex. Subtracting seven again and again takes a lot of mental energy, which means the emotional brain has to take a ‘back seat’, and more of your attention shifts to the logical, present-focused part of your mind. This can help interrupt dissociation, panic or overwhelming distress by giving the mind a specific, absorbing task to focus on.

1. Choose a starting number, typically 100 (some people choose 1000).
2. Subtract seven, then keep subtracting seven from each new number: 100, 93, 86, and so on.
3. If you lose track, that's completely fine, simply start again from your last clear number, or pick a new starting point.
4. Continue for as long as needed, until your attention feels more anchored in the present.

Practise Daily, Not Just When You Need It

These strategies work best when they're practised every day, whether or not you're feeling distressed at the time. Similar to a fire drill, practising these skills makes them more ‘second nature’, which is useful during times of distress. Skills that are only ever tried out in a crisis tend to be much harder to access in a crisis. Skills that have been rehearsed calmly, over and over, become far more automatic, and far more available, exactly when you need them most.

It's also worth practising earlier in the day, rather than saving these strategies for when things have already become difficult. Regularly bringing your body back to a calmer state helps lower your overall baseline level of arousal. With a lower baseline, it generally takes more, and takes longer, for stress to build up to an overwhelming level, giving you a wider window to notice what's happening and respond before things escalate.

Making These Strategies Your Own

Often, people will have a few favourites from the list, and everyone is different. Some people find grounding techniques more helpful during acute distress, while relaxation techniques work better as a regular practice to lower overall tension over time. It's worth trying each of these a few times in a calm moment, so you know which ones feel most natural and effective for you before you actually need them, and before they become part of your Phase 2 toolkit in session.

These strategies are a genuinely useful part of the preparation and stabilisation work that happens before, and alongside, EMDR therapy moves into reprocessing distressing memories. They aren't a replacement for that work, but a foundation for it, giving you and your therapist confidence that you have reliable ways to return to a steadier state whenever they're needed.

Additional Resources Built in Therapy

The strategies on this page are general tools that can be useful for almost anyone, and they're a good place to start practising before therapy even begins. Alongside these, your therapist will also work with you to develop additional resources that are specific to EMDR itself, such as the safe/calm state, container exercises for setting aside distressing material between sessions, and other resourcing techniques designed to fit your particular history and needs. These aren't something you need to prepare in advance. They're built together with your therapist, in session, as part of your Phase 2 preparation.

If you'd like further information, please reach out to the clinic.