Anxiety advice moves in trends as fast as anything else online. Some of it holds up. A lot of it doesn’t. Here are three grounding techniques with genuine evidence behind them, including the ones I use myself.

Breathing, without the rigid counting

Most breathing techniques for anxiety ask you to follow a fixed pattern: four counts in, hold for four, four counts out. For some people, that structure is helpful. For others, myself included, a rigid count can tip someone into hyperventilating rather than calming down.

The version I use, and teach clients, is one I call “birthday breathing.” Breathe in like you’re smelling a cake. Hold for a beat. Then blow out an imaginary candle in one long, slow breath, no counting required, just making sure the breath out takes noticeably longer than the breath in.  Repeat as often as needed.  It’s basically just a nice big sigh – no pressure for perfection!

What matters physiologically is that imbalance. A longer exhale activates the vagus nerve and shifts the nervous system out of fight-or-flight and toward rest-and-digest. A 2023 Stanford study compared several brief breathing practices and found that techniques emphasising an extended exhale, called cyclic sighing, improved mood and reduced physiological arousal more effectively than mindfulness meditation over a month of daily practice (Balban et al., 2023). You don’t need to count anything or get the timing exact. You just need the out-breath to take longer than the in-breath.  Easy-peasy!

Sensory grounding: 5-4-3-2-1

Anxiety tends to pull attention into the future: what might happen, what could go wrong. Sensory grounding pulls attention back into the present moment, where, in most cases, you’re safe right now.

The most common version asks you to notice five things you can see, four you can hear, three you can touch, two you can smell, and one you can taste. The exact order doesn’t matter. What matters is deliberately engaging your senses instead of your thoughts. This draws on the same principle behind mindfulness-based approaches to anxiety: anchoring attention in immediate sensory experience interrupts anxious thought spirals rather than trying to out-think them (Kabat-Zinn, 1990).

Temperature: cold water

Dunking your face in a bowl of ice-cold water, taking a cold shower, or holding an ice cube against your skin triggers the mammalian dive reflex, an automatic physiological response that slows your heart rate and shifts your body toward calm. It’s one of the fastest ways to interrupt a panic spike, because it works directly on the body rather than asking you to think or breathe your way out of it first. This is one of the core distress tolerance skills taught in dialectical behaviour therapy for managing overwhelming emotion in the moment (Linehan, 2014).

None of these needs to be done perfectly to work. Different techniques suit different people, and even different days for the same person. On a day when my breath feels shaky and unreliable, cold water might do more for me than breathing ever could.

The goal isn’t finding the one “correct” technique. It’s having a few real options on hand, so that when anxiety shows up, you’re not starting from scratch.

References

Balban, M. Y., Neri, E., Kogon, M. M., Weed, L., Nouriani, B., Jo, B., Holl, G., Zeitzer, J. M., Spiegel, D., & Huberman, A. D. (2023). Brief structured respiration practices enhance mood and reduce physiological arousal. Cell Reports Medicine, 4(1), 100895. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.xcrm.2022.100895

Kabat-Zinn, J. (1990). Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness. Delacorte Press.

Linehan, M. M. (2014). DBT Skills Training Manual (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.