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Ground Yourself

Educational resource

A short attention exercise that uses concrete sensory information from the place you are in right now.

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Grounding returns attention to concrete present-moment information.

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Pause and name a few things you can directly notice through your senses: what you can see, hear, feel through touch, smell, and taste. You do not need to force a particular emotional result. The task is simply to move some attention from internal commentary to immediate sensory detail.

If one sense is uncomfortable or not useful, skip it. The exercise does not require completing a fixed count.

Source and scope

Source record: card-32 in the public MetalHatsCats CBT Toolkit v0.1.0. The source prompt describes grounding by focusing on the five senses.

Grounding exercises are general coping and attention tools. This page does not claim that the exercise treats anxiety, trauma, or any other condition.

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