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Feeling overwhelmed by racing thoughts? This video shares grounding exercises and sensory focus techniques to help you calm down when anxiety peaks. Nick Trenton walks you through practical steps rooted in cognitive behavioral approaches that you can use right now to manage anxious feelings and regain a sense of control. Whether you’re dealing with everyday worry, trauma responses, or more intense moments, these ways to calm down are designed to help you ground yourself when your mind won’t settle.
If you’re struggling with anxiety or overthinking and looking for ways to calm down during a racing mind or panic attack, Nick Trenton’s channel “The Path to Calm” is here to help. From grounding techniques and exercises that can reduce anxiety in the moment to insights on cognitive behavioral methods and mental health education, we aim to provide you with tools to manage your anxiety and break free from thought loops and trauma triggers.
Most of us have had the experience of feeling completely safe and still feeling like something is deeply wrong.
The pulse climbs, the chest tightens, the mind starts running worst case scenarios that have no real basis in what’s actually happening around us.
In the clinical literature, this gets described as a feedback loop.
A thought or a sensation gets noticed.
The noticing itself makes it feel bigger and pretty soon.
The original trigger is gone, but the panic keeps feeding on itself anyway.
Nick Trenton’s How to Turn Off Your Brain lays out one of the more widely used ways to interrupt that loop.
And it works by routing your attention through the one thing anxiety can’t touch your five senses.
The idea behind grounding techniques rests on a fairly simple piece of physiology.
Your fight-or-flight response evolved to protect you from real, present danger.
But anxiety hijacks that same machinery for threats that aren’t happening right now.
A conversation you’re replaying from last week or a meeting you’re dreading tomorrow.
The mind treats both of those as urgently as if they were happening this second, even though neither one of them is real in the way the present moment is real.
The body doesn’t have that luxury.
Your body only ever exists in the present moment, which makes it the most direct route back out of a spiral.
Now here’s how Trenton opens the chapter.
Anxiety has a funny way of fueling itself.
We can get caught in loops and a negative thought or sensation when focused on seems to grow larger and larger and soon we’re panicking about how much we’re panicking.
This mental loop is more or less what happens in a panic attack.
Isn’t it strange how a person can be in the grips of the most terrifying experience of their lives, convinced they’re about to die, even though in reality they’re just sitting in a mall where nothing is going on and they’re perfectly safe, such as the power of the mind?
Grounding techniques work because they recognize that anxiety is about detaching our senses from the real world.
Ordinarily, our fight-or-flight response is there to keep us safe from real dangers in the present moment.
But with anxiety, the danger is only imagined.
We respond to something that isn’t actually happening to us.
There’s one surefire way to come out of this mental loop, get back into our bodies.
The mind can carry us to the past to stress about things that have already happened in the past, things that might happen in the future.
But when we stay in the present, we notice how little there actually is to fear right in front of us.
Your brain can rush around in a million directions, but your body can only ever be in one place, the present.
Connect to that present by anchoring in your body’s senses.
Here’s how to do the 5-4-3-2-1 grounding technique.
Unlike some techniques, it’s quite easy to remember.
You can mix it up a little without changing the overall effectiveness.
Try it anytime you’re feeling stressed and overwhelmed, or when your mind is getting caught up in a reinforcing loop.
It’s effective for moments of overthinking and overwhelm, can be used after a big upset,
or if you’re feeling yourself slipping into a panic attack.
You only need a few minutes.
First, just take a few deep breaths and orient yourself.
Then, find five things around you that you can see.
Completely immerse yourself in the sense of sight.
Find something in your environment and focus on it.
It’s precise texture.
It’s color.
It’s shape.
Just explore the object with your eyes.
Do this for four more things.
Then find four things that you can touch.
Maybe you notice the feeling of the fabric on the chair you’re sitting on or the feeling of your hair against your cheek.
Next, find three things that you can hear.
There’s no need to identify positive or negative, good or bad, just listen.
You might hear the low hum of a computer, birds outside, or chatting next door.
Then, find two things you can smell.
Some people can find this difficult, but if you pay attention you may notice there are actually plenty of smells all around you.
Finally, find one thing that you can taste.
This may simply be the lingering taste of coffee on your tongue, or you may detect a faint taste of toothpaste.
If you can, and you want to, nibble on something nearby, or take a sip of something, even if it’s just water.
What’s the point of all this?
When you try it out for yourself, you’ll notice that after just a few minutes, you feel calmer and more grounded.
Sometimes all you need is to break the anxiety spiral and distract yourself long enough to calm down.
The technique is often just what’s needed to put the brakes on runaway anxiety.
You’re also doing something else with this technique.
Then that is inviting your body to notice just how little danger there really is.
Our minds can be screaming, danger, danger, danger, this is bad.
But if we pause a moment and check in with what is naturally happening, we realize that things are fine.
Sure, we may still have a problem to deal with, but we may be feeling far calmer and more in control about it than before.
You can try this technique anywhere and at any time.
Example.
If you’re having a hard time and feeling overwhelmed at work, you can always excuse yourself to the bathroom and take a few minutes to gather yourself with this exercise.
You can even do it in public without people being aware that you’re actively calming yourself down.
One twist on the usual five, four, three, two, one exercises to finish off with finding one positive thing about the present situation or about yourself.
Often when we’re lost in anxiety, we can feel like we’re being ridiculous and getting worried over nothing, and this can leave us with a strong sense of embarrassment or even shame.
Feeling so out of control can be a knock to our confidence and make us feel vulnerable and unsure of ourselves.
That’s why it’s so useful to ask yourself, what’s a good thing I can see in this situation right now?
What is one good thing I can recognize in myself right now?
It may be that at the end of the exercise, you become aware of a possible solution and that the problem doesn’t seem so bad anymore.
Maybe you simply remind yourself that you’ve been in tough situations before and you’ve coped with it just fine.
Or you realize that you have had the presence of mind and mental strength to recognize your anxiety and take control of the situation.
Well done.
You can feel proud about that.
What’s notable about the technique Trenton just walked through is how little it asks of you.
Five things you can see, four you can touch, three you can hear, two you can smell, one you can taste.
In that order, one sense fully at a time.
There’s no need to journal about it or believe anything in particular for it to work.
You’re simply giving your attention somewhere concrete to land, which is exactly what a racing mind is missing.
Research on grounding and present moment attention consistently points to the same mechanism.
You cannot be fully absorbed in a sensory detail in front of you, and fully absorbed in a catastrophic thought at the same time.
The two compete for the same limited attention, and the senses are much easier to win that competition
Trenton also builds in a twist worth calling out on its own.
After working through the five senses, you’re invited to name one good thing about the present situation or about yourself.
And that matters, because anxiety rarely travels alone.
It tends to bring a layer of embarrassment with it.
A sense of being ridiculous for reacting this strongly to something that in hindsight wasn’t actually dangerous.
Ending the exercise on a small, honest note of self-recognition pushes back on that shame directly, rather than just calming the nervous system and leaving the self-criticism untouched.
Now, sensory grounding isn’t the only route back to the present, and it pairs well with the second technique that works through attention rather than the senses.
In his book, Calm Your Emotions, Trenton describes a method called mental noting, catching a thought as it rises, labeling it in a word or two, and letting it pass.
The same way a meditation bell interrupts a room and pulls everyone back into the present.
He pairs it with something even simpler, pouring your full attention into an ordinary task like washing the dishes until the task itself becomes the anchor.
Here’s how he puts it in the book.
People who struggle with anxiety are actually blessed with a secret superpower.
If they harness it, they are able to tap into an enormous potential for heightened conscious awareness.
Every intrusive and anxious thought can be like a meditation bell calling you to awareness and bringing you back into the moment.
How?
Try mental noting.
It’s easy.
One, become aware and observe yourself having thoughts.
No judgment.
Two, note the experience and label it.
I’m thinking.
Three, keep going.
Repeat until the thought dissipates or you move on.
Every time you have a thought, any thought at all, you can stop and remember to become aware of yourself.
In some Buddhist temples and monasteries a meditation bell rings periodically so that wherever people are and whatever they’re doing at that moment they can stop and reconnect to the present again.
You can do the same with your own thoughts and self-talk.
Every time you hear an anxious thought treat it as a bell that has rung to remind you to come back to the present.
Of course, you won’t be able to maintain awareness 100% of the time, but if you can grab hold of an anxious thought and note it down for what it is, then you can transform any thought into an opportunity to be mindful.
This technique is inspired by many different meditation techniques and is designed to quell distractions and calm down what the Buddhists call monkey mind, that inner chat that thoughtlessly leaps from one thing to another.
Mental noting might not seem like much, but if you pepper your day with little moments of metacognition in this way, be prepared for big, big changes in the long run.
Practice this often enough and you’ll find it much more difficult to become fused with negative thoughts.
You simply maintain too much distance to ever get too tangled up.
Just remember three key elements when you practice mental noting.
Your intentions should be to maintain awareness of the present moment.
Your attention should be on everything that’s happening in the present only.
Your attitude should be non-directional, non-judgmental and kind.
The classical approach during meditation is to say, for example, there is hearing or hearing has happened when you notice a dog barking outside.
You might be really zen and simply note hearing
You don’t allow yourself to run off and follow the hearing so that you’re soon thinking, that’s the neighbor’s dog, or I wish it would shut up.
You simply note and label what your brain is doing, then move on.
In the case of anxiety, you do something similar to stop yourself from getting distracted by thoughts that seem urgent and important, but aren’t really.
So if you’re sitting at your desk, trying to work, and you notice a thought pop into your mind, the performance review is going to be so awkward.
You stop in your tracks, note the thought, label it, and move on without engaging.
Ruminating, you say, and pass it by.
Another way to bring in the principles of mindfulness to a brain that’s hooked on anxiety is called mundane task focusing.
If you’re one of the many people who dislike meditation or simply don’t find room in their lives to practice it, don’t worry.
The Buddhists and meditators don’t have the monopoly on mindfulness.
All that’s required to calm an anxious mind is to remain in the moment.
Anxieties and worries live elsewhere.
They’re in the past or the future.
If you anchor right here and right now, though, your world slows down and becomes calmer and way more manageable.
One, pick a mundane and everyday task that doesn’t require too much brain power.
For example, washing dishes.
Two, do the task, but do it very intentionally.
Pay ultra close attention to what you’re doing.
Focus on the bubbles of the soap, the temperature of the water, the rhythmic movement of your hands and the weight of each dish as you hold it.
As you can see, this is a form of grounding.
Three, when your mind wanders, pull it back to the task at hand.
commit every last ounce of your attention to the task unfolding before you, nothing more.
You can find immense relief from overthinking and worrying by doing completely ordinary everyday tasks like walking to the post office or filling the car with fuel.
Boundary Defense
You’re on your way to work, and an aggressive person handing out pamphlets in the streets gets in your way, forcing you to politely but firmly say no.
You get to work and are asked to chip in to a company fundraiser for charity, despite the fact that you’ve already contributed hundreds this year alone.
You graciously say no to this as well.
That annoying colleague who sits two desks down from you walks over during lunch and launches into a big rant about her ex-husband.
To stop from becoming her free daily therapy, you politely excuse yourself.
At the canteen, you spot that one server at the till who’s always playfully forcing you to have one more scoop of potato salad on your plate despite your protests.
Today, you avoid them entirely and stand in another line instead.
Preventative care is important, but what might be even more important is to train yourself to defend against those who are actively trying to undermine your emotional resilience and actually prefer you unstable.
This is when you must proactively establish self-defense from others, whereas the rest of this book has been about defeating your own demons and defending against yourself.
For our purposes, this comes in the form of defending your boundaries.
That people don’t always behave as we’d like is a hard lesson to learn in all relationships.
Seeing apathy, carelessness, or lack of respect for others’ feelings is a great source of stress and unhappiness.
Trying to modify others to act and feel in ways we prefer is an exhausting and futile exercise.
This is simply because it’s a battle we can never win.
There will always be someone who wants to talk over you, twist your arm, or try to get you to agree to more than you’re comfortable with.
It’s, sadly, a fact of life.
All we can do is adjust ourselves and what we accept from others.
We demonstrate our capacity for love, communication, support, and inspiration as best as we can and in ways we hope can be perceived.
In others, we seek affirmation, or at least recognition of our best efforts.
In rare cases, we may find those who ideals closely mirror our own, but ultimately, other people do what they’re going to do, and we either accept them for who they are or walk away from them.
However, there’s an element of relationships that you have more control over than you may think.
It’s a healthy kind of control that respects your values and feelings and reinforces your balanced relationships with others.
That element is setting and keeping emotional boundaries.
This doesn’t mean devising a list of ultimatums that other people must live up to or risk losing your friendship.
Neither does it mean erecting a wall around your emotions or feelings in overprotection.
What boundaries do mean is making sure that you’re caring for yourself first and foremost.
They keep you happy, healthy, and emotionally balanced.
Boundaries in healthy relationships are strong and scrupled, but flexible enough to respond to altered circumstances and each party’s own uniqueness.
They support each member’s efforts to live full lives while developing legitimate respect, trust, and support over a long period of time.
Setting up boundaries is an introspective and practical process, and occasionally people will tell you that your boundaries are wrong.
They might be right, but subjective boundaries also exist.
Define your limits.
Be honest with yourself about the point where others’ behaviors crosses your personal lines for acceptance and safety.
What subjects are you sensitive to, no matter how objectively silly they might sound?
At what level does someone’s voice go from concern to anger?
What makes you comfortable and what makes you anxious?
monitor your feelings.
Trusting your gut is certainly a key thing to do when you’re confronted with an immediate situation, but pay close attention to how you’re reacting in social or low pressure circumstances as well.
If a conversation’s taking a turn that makes you uncomfortable, mark that point and ask yourself what could be causing your stress.
Being self-aware in itself isn’t a sign of narcissism or selfishness.
It’s a basic survival mechanism.
Your annoyance, discomfort, or guilt is the red flag that your boundaries are being stomped on.
Set a communication plan.
Very few of us talk or act the same way with every single person we know.
If we do, that’s probably a problem.
But in close relationships, at some point the need to discuss our boundaries will arise, and you should make a plan in advance for how you will communicate your feelings.
Being direct is always the preference, but the definition of our relationship is important in figuring out how to express that directness.
In personal relationships we might feel free to speak openly and ruminate.
In professional or complicated situations we may need to be level and determined.
Keeping up a sense of self-awareness, as mentioned, is a key part of relationship health.
Being truthful about the effectiveness of our internal boundaries and taking proactive corrective measures when they fall short is crucial to this honesty.
It also goes a very long way in protecting oneself from the operations of emotional manipulators.
Even if we know and set our emotional boundaries, we may overlook them in practice with others or not always recognize when our boundaries are being trespassed.
Since emotional manipulators thrive on blurring those boundaries and resetting them to reflect their own interests, developing a keener sense of when those trespasses happen is extremely useful.
For obvious reasons, it’s easier to notice verbal violations.
Any effort to invalidate or disparage you or your emotions should be evaluated in relation to your boundaries.
These include someone not allowing you to speak or be heard by silencing or talking over you, screaming, making derogatory statements about your integrity, or even flat out gossiping about you in plain sight.
Violations of your psychological and emotional boundaries can be more difficult to spot and harder to quantify that could include the following.
praying on your self-esteem, using things you’ve said to them in confidence against you, lying, criticizing, demeaning and judging, making fun of you or your thoughts, feelings and beliefs, making you feel guilty or responsible, demanding your time and energy, shaming and embarrassing, bullying
Claiming their thoughts and beliefs are superior to yours.
While defining and setting up boundaries is the important pivot point in any relationship, maintaining them is equally essential.
Psychologist Dana Guianta identified two key feelings that should be red flags that we’re letting go of our boundaries.
Discomfort.
When someone acts in a way that makes you feel uncontrollable, that’s a cue to us.
They may be violating or crossing a boundary.
Discomfort can arise from triggers about past issues or traumas, someone communicating in an overly frantic or antagonistic way, or being in an unexpected or unsafe situation.
It can also simply arise from being put in a position where you feel interpersonal tension, resentment,
This usually comes from being taken advantage of, or not being appreciated.
We feel that someone else is imposing their expectations on us.
Resentment can arise when we’re asked to fix an ongoing series of crises, when we get left out of important work decisions after habitually working overtime, or when we simply don’t get anything back from what we give.
Guanto recommends gauging our feelings on a scale from 1 to 10 and sounding the alarm if our intensity goes higher than 6.
When that happens, she suggests asking what’s causing the feelings and what about the situation is bothering you.
Frequently, the root impetuses are fear, guilt, and self-doubt.
We fear others’ responses when we set and keep our boundaries, we feel guilty if we speak up or say no, and we doubt that we even deserve to have boundaries in the first place.
What we have to remember is that boundaries are key signs of a healthy relationship and vital steps towards self-respect.
You’re the exclusive owner of your own feelings.
And as their protector, you have full permission to set and preserve your emotional boundaries.
But knowing where you stand is a necessary measure in deciding your boundaries.
Identify your limits, physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual.
Concentrate on what you can tolerate and what you can’t accept.
Those feelings help us identify what our limits are, Gianta says.
Take time to consider your present social circle in close friendships.
Think about whether your give and take is healthy and whether the relationships are truly reciprocal.
If you notice a certain behavioral strain or commonality with your friends or with yourself, address it in your investigation, whether good or bad.
It could help detect further clues about your emotional realities.
Finally, examine how your daily environment outside of relationships could be impacting your health.
Your work environment is a good place to start.
For example, if your workday is supposed to be 8 hours, but your coworkers regularly stay at least 10 or 11, is there an unspoken mandate that you’re supposed to go above and beyond?
How does your office cope with sudden emergencies or long-term conflicts?
Keeping boundaries intact is a solo exercise.
It springs from your own personal observations and experience.
It can be challenging, especially if somebody feels they’re the only one trying to maintain boundaries, but it’s a regular way to tend to our feelings and needs and a good mechanism to remind ourselves how we need to honor them.
Takeaways.
What is preventative care in the context of mastering your emotions and keeping calm while the world spins on?
It’s recognizing the fact that our brains have an intense negativity bias.
Even while things are going well and we aren’t on the brink of disaster and thus we should seek to immunize our resilience through daily actions.
Writing your feelings down in a journal is not an uncommon piece of advice.
It’s the act of expressing yourself and then being able to introspect later on.
Most of us miss these two important steps and our emotions remain pent up and unable to develop and unfurl.
of particular use is writing down all your worries and then writing down solutions for them.
Also, you can write down two distinct types of lists.
Stop doing this, something detrimental, or it’s okay to, something beneficial.
With anxiety, our goal is not to force ourselves not to worry, but to worry more efficiently.
Scheduling worry time puts you in proactive control and helps you gain distance.
Notice the anxiety.
Write down the time you’ll postpone to with the duration and content.
Then follow through as agreed.
Mental noting and focused mundane tasks can help you turn anxious moments into opportunities for mindfulness.
Finally, come to the defense of your boundaries.
This book has talked about how to deal with yourself, but what about others?
After all, people are probably our strongest emotional triggers and they hold enormous power over us.
The best step for this is to understand boundaries.
Now what ties these two methods together is the same principle from earlier.
Your attention can only fully occupy one thing at a time.
So the more concretely you occupy it, the less room is left for anxious rehearsal.
Naming a thought, ruminating and letting it pass, works on the same mechanism as scanning five things you can see.
It just uses language instead of the senses to do it.
Now, if you want to try any of this yourself, start with the 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 sequence exactly as written the first few times, 5, then 4, and then 3, 2, 1, before adapting it to fit odd moments like a bathroom break at work or a quiet second in a waiting room.
All of it, it’s meant to be portable enough to use anywhere, without anyone around you knowing you’re doing it.
And if you found this useful, there’s a lot more where it came from in Trenton’s work.
You can subscribe to the channel for more.
Miles Davis put his finger on something close to what these techniques are really asking of you.
He said, I know what the power of silence is, and you talk about listening.
Getting quite enough to actually listen to your senses or to your thoughts is, in the end, the whole exercise.
