Hey, guys, welcome to not another anxiety show. I'm your host, Kelly Walker, and today I'll be sharing a new grounding exercise with you.

Now, I know I've already shared a few of these with you in the past.

The 5-4-321 exercise comes to mind, but today's is actually a little bit different.

In the past, I've only shared sensory awareness grounding exercises, which is just a fancy way of saying, use your five senses

to engage in the here and now. Whereas today's grounding exercise is actually a cognitive

grounding exercise, meaning we're going to use the power of thinking to reorient us to the here

and now. These cognitive grounding exercises can be particularly useful when we're experiencing depersonalization or derealization.

And that's because in both of these states, our sensory perception tends to feel a bit wonky or off or askew.

So it can make using any sort of sensory grounding exercise feel a bit

overwhelming. Kind of like asking someone that's having a panic attack to focus on their breath.

Now, it's been a bit of a chaotic week here, and I've definitely been unknowingly reacting to the

chaos with little to no awareness.

And one example that comes to mind is we actually found out my pregnancy is higher risk than we

initially thought. Obviously, that was a scary thing to hear. So with absolutely no awareness,

I clicked on the internet icon on my phone and jumped right into hardcore research mode.

I think we all know how that ends.

Usually not very well, in this case with a couple of tears.

So because there's been absolutely no awareness, I've been caught in this reactive mode cycle,

feeling a bit frazzled, overwhelmed, lower resiliency.

So this exercise is as much for me as for anyone else tuning in today.

And keep in mind, this exercise isn't meant to eliminate anxiety. It's just meant to serve as a

boogie board to help us surf those waves of anxiety so that we can have a little bit more

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