If your child has been struggling with all the uncertainty and changes that the pandemic has brought, then these grounding exercises to calm anxious children could help.
They’re all designed to help your child focus on the world around them and the sensory input they’re experiencing. They help them feel grounded and connected, which in turn helps them feel calmer and stops their anxiety overwhelming them.
1. Get anxious energy out first
When your child is feeling anxious, they may well have a fair bit of nervous energy.
This can make it really hard for them to settle and focus properly on grounding exercises. So encourage them to move their bodies and get some of that nervous energy out.
They could run around the garden, do some star jumps, or have a dance around the living room to some upbeat music.
To help them use movement in a more focused way to feel more grounded you can get them to stamp their feet once, one at a time, and then blow a big breath of air out.
The stamping helps get their energy out while connecting to the earth beneath them. And the big breaths help them blow away their anxieties.
2. Use the 5-4-3-2-1 technique
This is a well-known technique for grounding and calming anxiety, and it works brilliantly with children as well as adults.
The idea is that you draw your child’s attention away from what’s making them anxious, and get them to focus on their 5 senses.
Ask them to sit and then look around them and list:
- 5 things they can see
- 4 things they can feel
- 3 things they can hear
- 2 things they can smell
- 1 thing they can taste
You can do this indoors, but it can work especially well if you head outside where they can breathe in fresh air and feel the earth beneath them. There are so many mental health benefits of being outside, so use this to your advantage to help calm your child when they’re anxious.
If this is a bit too much for your children then simplify it a bit.
Ask them to just list things they can see, for example, 5 shapes they can see, 4 colours they can see, 3 words they can see, and so on.
If they need a bit more time to feel grounded then ask them to work through the alphabet, naming things they can see, hear, or feel starting with each letter.
3. Try to be a tree
Another way to use the power of nature to help calm an anxious child is to get them to pretend to be a tree.
Ask them to take their shoes and socks off and plant their feet firmly on the ground, just like a tree.
Then let them close their eyes and feel the connection between themselves and the ground. If you want to you can encourage them to talk through what they’re doing, with statements like “I am a tree, firmly planted in the earth”, “I am strong and safe”, and “my branches stretch up to the sky”.
The aim of all three of these grounding exercises is to help anxious children bring their focus and attention to something other than their worries. They bring them back to the present moment and help them connect to the world around them to stop anxious thoughts from taking over.
Have you ever used these techniques before? Which do you think would help your child the most?