Five Senses, One Moment: A simple way to help manage anxiety, depression, and overwhelm
In the years I’ve practiced trauma-focused therapy as a clinical social worker, I’ve noticed something about the value of grounding: Sometimes a very simple exercise can help people move through distressing emotions and get back to doing what matters to them.
One of my favorite grounding techniques uses the five senses—sight, touch, sound, smell, and taste—to orient you to your immediate surroundings. It doesn’t make difficult circumstances disappear. Instead, it brings your attention back to what is happening right now, rather than what happened yesterday or what might happen tomorrow.
And sometimes that shift is enough to help you take the next step toward something that matters to you.
The Five Senses Exercise
The method is simple. First, pause whatever you are doing—or whatever train of thought you’re caught up in. Then move through your senses, noticing and naming what each one connects you with in your immediate surroundings.
Some senses may be easier to access than others, depending on the person and the situation. That’s fine. The point isn’t to perform the exercise perfectly. It’s to engage as fully as you can with the physical world around you.
Here’s what it looks like for me, sitting on the porch of the rural Maryland cabin where I practice:
5 things I can see: the black walnut trees across my field; my fluffy white rooster strutting around; the gravel path leading to my cabin; the porch floorboards; and a garbage truck pulling up on the rural highway beyond my home.
4 things I can touch: the bug bites on my wrist; the rough floorboards beneath me; the edge of my cotton T-shirt; and the frame of my glasses.
3 things I can hear: my rooster clucking as he roots around for weeds to eat; the garbage truck rumbling nearby; and a downy woodpecker tapping away at a tree behind me.
2 things I can smell: mud from the field and my coffee.
1 thing I can taste: coffee.
What Grounding Does—and Doesn't Do
This exercise doesn’t solve the problems at hand. It won’t finish the piles of paperwork that keep my practice running, for example, or magically motivate me to go for the run I’ve been putting off.
What sensory grounding can do is interrupt rumination and pull your attention away from distressing thoughts about things that happened in the past. It can also give you a temporary break from future-focused thinking and the endless chain of “what ifs” that often accompanies anxiety.
The reason is remarkably simple: You are directing your attention to what is actually happening in this moment.
And very often, the present moment is manageable—even when it isn’t pleasant, and even when it’s painful.
You may not know how you’re going to get through the next month, week, or even day. But can you get through this moment? Can you notice the floor beneath your feet? The temperature of the air? A sound outside the window? The taste of the coffee in your mouth?
Then you can deal with the moment after that.
Why I Teach This Exercise
I first learned a version of this exercise years ago during training in Seeking Safety, a therapeutic approach designed to help people cope more safely with trauma and substance use.
One idea from that training has stayed with me: When people are overwhelmed, they often reach for ways to escape experiences that feel unbearable. Grounding offers another possibility. Rather than trying to solve everything at once—or escape from it altogether—you deliberately narrow your attention to the present.
That takes active engagement. You are looking, listening, touching, smelling, and noticing. In doing so, you create a little space between an overwhelming feeling and whatever you might impulsively do in response to it.
If senses are overwhelming go even simpler: Count the buttons on your shirt, the windows in your room, or the fingers on your hands. Stay concrete and focused on your surroundings. Here’s another reference point if you would like to watch a video describing a very similar approach.
That space can matter.
Grounding can be useful when you’re struggling with urges to drink or use another substance, lash out at someone, panic, shut down, or engage in some other behavior that may make an already difficult situation worse. It doesn't guarantee that an urge will disappear. The goal is more modest and, in many situations, more useful: Get through this moment safely enough to make a deliberate choice about what happens next.
