A Fresh Perspective: Grounding Skills That Go Beyond "Just Breathe"

Have you had this experience: You're feeling overwhelmed, stressed, maybe spiraling a little and someone tells you to "just breathe."

And you want to say: I AM breathing. IT'S NOT HELPING!

It can feel dismissive in the moment, but the advice itself isn't terrible. Breathing can help us relax and settle. First, though, it's useful to understand how and why breathing works and what other tools might help us in moments of stress or overwhelm.

What Is Grounding?

Grounding isn't a relaxation technique, exactly. It's more specific than that.

When you're overwhelmed, your attention tends to get pulled away from what's actually happening and into thoughts or worries of what might happen next. Grounding is a way of bringing your attention back to the present. Not by forcing anything to change, but by reconnecting to something real in the moment.

It's a simple idea, but not a new one. When you're feeling dysregulated, disconnected, or overwhelmed, returning to physical awareness helps you reconnect with what's actually happening.

In our first blog, we wrote about what happens when stress narrows our perspective, that we tend to fall into patterns, react before we've processed, and keep approaching the same problem the same way. Grounding is one of the most practical ways to interrupt that process. Not by fixing what's wrong, but by creating enough of a pause to approach it differently.

When you're overwhelmed, your nervous system is reacting to something, real or anticipated, and your mind tends to follow it somewhere unhelpful. Grounding is about interrupting that loop. Not suppressing it, not fixing whatever caused it. Just creating a small moment of contact with the present so your nervous system has something concrete to work with.

The loop, by the way, is what happens when anxiety or overwhelm feeds itself. Your thoughts trigger a stress response, which makes your thoughts more anxious, which triggers more stress, and so on. The loop isn't a character flaw. It's just how the nervous system works when it perceives a threat, real or imagined. Grounding interrupts it by giving your brain and body something else to do.

It doesn't need to be elaborate. In fact, the simpler the better.

Four Tools Worth Having

Breathe, but with one small adjustment

When you're anxious or overwhelmed, breathing often changes in a way you might not notice. You tend to focus so much on breathing in that you never fully breathe out. You take short, shallow inhales and hold the tension in your chest without realizing it. If you've ever felt like you were hyperventilating, that's likely what was happening: too much air coming in, not enough going out.

The adjustment is simple: exhale a little longer than you inhale. That's what actually activates the part of your nervous system that signals to your body that it's okay to slow down. Three or four rounds is usually enough to feel something shift.

Feel something

When your mind is pulled somewhere else entirely – replaying a conversation, anticipating something that hasn't happened yet – your senses can pull you back.

Cold water on your hands. Something textured you can hold. A mint. The specific physical sensation interrupts the loop in a way that thinking about interrupting it never quite does. It doesn't need to make logical sense. It just needs to give your nervous system something real to register in the present moment.

Move, even when you don't want to

This one matters because the instinct when you're overwhelmed is usually the opposite. When you're upset or overwhelmed you likely want to curl up. Get cozy under a blanket. Escape into a show, a phone, a nap. And that impulse makes complete sense, it feels like relief.

But here's the problem: stillness and withdrawal tend to feed the loop rather than interrupt it. The nervous system stays activated. The thoughts keep circling. What feels like rest is often just the loop running quietly in the background.

Movement, even small movement, shifts your physical state, and your mental state tends to follow. It doesn't have to be a walk or a workout. Your hands, your feet, standing up for thirty seconds. The point isn't exercise. It's interruption.

Ask yourself one question

This one works differently than the others. The first three work through the body. This one works through perspective.

What else could be true right now?

Not to talk yourself out of how you're feeling. Not to force a silver lining. Just to create a small amount of space between you and the story your brain is currently running.

When we're overwhelmed, our thinking narrows. We get certain. The thing we're worried about feels fixed, inevitable, completely real. One question, genuinely asked, not rhetorically, can interrupt that narrowing. It doesn't solve anything. But it creates room.

That's usually where something useful starts to happen.

A Note on These Tools

None of these tools will fix what's actually wrong. They're not meant to. What they do is create enough space to approach whatever is wrong from a slightly steadier place.

Grounding isn't avoidance, it's preparation. A way of coming back to yourself before you have to deal with whatever you're facing.

If you find yourself needing these tools frequently – if the overwhelm feels persistent rather than situational – that's worth paying attention to. Not as a crisis, just as information. Sometimes what helps most isn't a grounding tool. It's having a space where you can actually slow down and figure out what's going on.

That's what we do at LIKEMIND. If you're curious whether it might be useful, we'd love to hear from you.

Written by Tessa Hayes, LICSW, founder of LIKEMIND Mental Health & Wellness, a group practice in Worcester, MA specializing in therapy and support for young adults and adults navigating life transitions.

Feeling Stuck? The LIKEMIND Approach to Moving Forward

There’s a particular kind of stuck that doesn’t look dramatic from the outside.

You’re functioning. You’re showing up. You’re doing what you’re supposed to do. But internally, something isn’t moving. You keep circling the same decision, the same conversation, or the same question. And no matter how much you think about it, nothing seems to shift. You can’t quite move forward.

If that feels familiar, you’ve probably been sitting with it for a while. At LIKEMIND, this is where a lot of our work begins.

Where This Started

People sometimes ask what makes LIKEMIND different. What it would actually feel like to sit down with one of us. It's a fair thing to wonder when you're looking for someone you hope will become a safe space. Someone you can open up to about whatever's been on your mind, the good and the bad.

LIKEMIND was founded in 2017 and, from the beginning, the clinicians who came together here had something in common. Not the same background or the same therapeutic approach, but the same instinct about how to be with people. Curious. Respectful. Willing to sit with something – an issue, a puzzle, a complication – before trying to fix it.

We eventually started calling that approach: Being LIKEMINDed.

What It Actually Means

Being LIKEMINDed isn't a technique. It's more of a philosophy – an attitude or a way of showing up. It might look like:

• Sitting with a question instead of rushing toward an answer

• Letting a thought fully unfold before trying to interpret it

• Not assuming you already know why you feel the way you do

It means respect – which, in practice, often looks like slowing down. Letting someone finish a thought. Not deciding what something means before you've really heard it.

And it means welcome. Creating the kind of space where you don’t have to edit yourself or “get it right” before you speak. Where it's okay to be uncertain, or frustrated, or not have it all figured out yet.

There's also a dash of humor in there. Because even in the middle of something hard, a moment of lightness can help you breathe again.  

Why You Might Feel Stuck

When we’re overwhelmed, our perspective tends to narrow. We fall into patterns. We react quickly, often before we've had a chance to fully process what’s happening. Then we try to solve the problem from that same narrowed place and end up right back where we started.  

Young adulthood tends to amplify this. There are more decisions, more life transitions, and more pressure than at almost any other point in life – figuring out career, relationships, identity, and finances, often all at once, often without a clear roadmap. And there’s often an unspoken expectation that you should already know what you’re doing. The version of "having it together" that everyone around you seems to project is largely fictional. But it doesn't feel that way when you're in it. 

What we’ve seen, again and again, in working with young adults and adults through their 20s and 30s, is that most people don't need someone to tell them what to do. They need room to think. They need a space where slowing down is actually possible. Where someone is genuinely interested in understanding their experience and not rushing toward a solution.

It's Not About Having the Right Answer

Here's something we come back to a lot:

It's not about having the right answer. It's about staying in the conversation long enough for something new to emerge.

Most of us are taught to solve things. To figure it out, decide, move on. And when we can't do that quickly, we start to interpret the stuckness we feel as a personal failure. Something must be wrong with us. We should be further along by now.

But what if being stuck isn't a sign that something's wrong? What if it's just a signal that your current way of looking at something has run its course?

Being LIKEMINDed is the reframe. It isn’t about forcing positivity or "thinking differently" in a superficial way. It’s about gently widening your perspective. Sometimes that starts with a simple question: 

• What have I missed?

• What might I not be taking into account?

• Could there be a more balanced way to see this?

These aren’t meant to fix the problem instantly. They're not trying to make you feel better by forcing a silver lining. They just create a little space – and that space is often where movement begins.  

What This Looks Like Over Time

Change isn’t always dramatic. It doesn’t always come in big, obvious moments. Sometimes it's:

• Realizing that the decision you've been agonizing over isn't as permanent as it felt;

• Noticing a pattern you hadn’t seen before;

• Understanding that something you took personally was never really about you.   

Those shifts can be subtle, but they matter. They create options where things once felt fixed. 

What to Do When You Feel Stuck

If you’re in that place right now, you’re not behind and you’re not broken.  

You're a person dealing with a genuinely difficult stretch in a world that doesn't always make space for that.

Sometimes what helps most isn't more advice. It's having someone sit with you – someone who’s genuinely interested in how you’re making sense of things, and not in rushing toward an answer.  

That's what we aim to offer at LIKEMIND. 

If you’re wondering whether this kind of approach might be helpful,we'd love to hear from you. We’re always open to starting a conversation.

Written by Tessa Hayes, LICSW, founder of LIKEMIND Mental Health & Wellness, a group practice in Worcester, MA specializing in therapy and support for young adults and adults navigating life transitions.