Mental Health Moment 8/1/2025
5-4-3-2-1 To Manage Anxiety
This might not surprise you to learn, but anxiety is on the rise. Coping and grounding skills can be useful tools in managing anxiety but it can be helpful to know more about how these skills work.
First, coping skills will not solve the problem you are dealing with. If you are feeling stressed, sad, or scared about a problem, taking deep breaths will only do so much towards solving the problem. However, taking deep breaths (or listening to music or working on an art project, etc.) will help calm and clear your mind so that you can approach the problem from a more balanced mental space. A coping skill, properly employed, gets you through the crisis so that you can address the problem you are dealing with from an improved mental space.
Grounding skills, while similar to coping skills, serve the purpose of reconnecting a person to the present moment. Sometimes, anxiety and distress become so overwhelming that a person can experience flashbacks, distressing memories, and negative emotions that can lead a person to feel in some ways disconnected from their body. People sometimes report these feelings as having extremities go numb, feeling dizzy, constricted breathing, or other similar experiences. When you feel this way, it is important to spend some time reconnecting and grounding yourself to prevent the anxiety from overwhelming you.
There are many useful coping and grounding skills that can be implemented at times like these. Healthline, a mental health website, has a list of 30 Grounding Techniques that you can use. And, as always, if the challenge of anxiety becomes more than you feel like you can safely handle, I encourage you to speak to a friend or a qualified professional for support.
