Cropped from a photo of Steens Mountain by Oregon Bureau of Land Management photographer Bob Wick. The photo is licensed CC-BY-2.0.

What does a self-regulation exercise do?

These exercises are designed to bring you out of states where you don’t feel mentally present to the current moment, into states where you are and can feel relatively OK about it. Bringing yourself back like this is an important skill that cuts across all kinds of personal histories and mental health struggles. It can look like all kinds of mental or sensory activities that in some way require you to be somewhere here, actively attending to what you’re doing, rather than somewhere else like being lost in thought, separate from your body, daydreaming, dissociated or anything similar. Doing that over time will tend to make deeper work to dislodge the hard problems in your life easier.

Read more to see how to do this, where to be cautious, and how to call if you want more help.

What are self-regulation exercises not good for?

It’s also important to talk about what improved access to self-regulation doesn’t do.

It’s not a complete solution. In fact, the vast majority of mental health struggles won’t be solved by it. However, due to its simplicity and its importance as a small piece of bigger picture solutions, sometimes it comes up in counterproductive ways. Some people I’ve talked to have been fed up with well-meaning friends, family, social media or authority figures giving incomplete solutions, sometimes with an expectation dangled along with it that you’ll shut up about what’s bothering you. (See: https://www.reddit.com/r/thanksimcured/).

I don’t want to do that. So:

1. Self-regulation does not solve long term problems on its own. It’s a way to get yourself in a better headspace to do other work with a longer term focus.
2. Self-regulation does not get you out of present moment situations that are unsafe. Trauma can often make the present feel as if it’s unsafe, but using grounding as a first step towards healing trauma in part must mean being safe from situations that are legitimately likely to retraumatize you. Protection and distance from abuse, violence or any other unsafe situation needs to come first. Once that’s established, much of the work of healing trauma will involve an ongoing push-and-pull between what feels unsafe vs. what is actually unsafe. That’s addressed on a separate page on this site.
3. Self-regulation does not change material conditions in the outside world. If you come to me and tell me that you’re upset about the state of the world and I tell you to just breathe, you may rightfully feel that what I’m telling you to do doesn’t help the problem. The point is not to fix the bigger problems, it’s to allow you to have enough energy and space to think so that you can feel some sense of agency and choice when deciding how to respond to those big problems.
4. The wrong kind of self-regulation exercises can be counterproductive. Some people prone to feeling anxiety or panic find that certain types of focus on or pacing of breathing can make those feelings worse ¹. There’s also some evidence that more severe psychological suffering may go with less sense of safety around bodily sensations ². Even if this describes you, you can still probably try any self-regulation exercise with minimal risk of harm by simply backing out of it if it feels like getting worse. If that happens or if you just want to skip something else though, you can leave the more breath- or bodily-focused exercises below aside and instead choose something like the 5-4-3-2-1 method that places more focus on the outside world.

Even with these limitations in mind, self-regulation is also an important foundation for working on all kinds of other problems in your life (whether self-directed or with a therapist).

What self-regulation exercises should I start with?

Whichever you choose, please commit to trying it at least once. Once you have a feeling for it, practice it a few times. Do it in a few different settings and at different times of the day. Think ahead to times you might need it, and try to give yourself reminders-in-advance to respond to a stressful situation by going and doing the thing that you’ve practiced.

This will help you to have the confidence and presence of mind to know that when you actually need these techniques, you’ll be able to do them.

I recommend starting with a few exercises from the list of DBT TIPP skills, in particular:

1. Dunking the face in cold water or ice – IF you don’t have specific trauma or a serious aversion to cold, or medical reasons to avoid sudden changes in heart rate.
   • This activates the mammalian dive reflex, slows your heart rate, and also provides a bit of a subjective “jolt” with a stimulus that’s strong enough to make it hard to keep paying attention to runaway thoughts or feelings.
   • The nerves that are the most sensitive source of the diving reflex are concentrated in the upper lip, so it’s best to at least get that part of you in cold water if you can. The effect may be even stronger though if your face is fully submerged and you’re holding your breath³. If you’re not seeing the effect with just water or ice on part of the face, try that.
   • If you want to convince yourself it’s doing something, try tracking your heart rate while you’re doing it. For low-tech you can count in your head and check a clock, or you can use a smart watch or a phone app like “Instant Heart Rate” on iOS. The effect should be hard to miss. For me, unless I’ve already been sitting still for many minutes, I can see a drop of 10-20 beats per minute in less than 30 seconds.
2. Paced breathing – IF you don’t find it counterproductive like I described in the previous section on what can go wrong with grounding.
   • “Box breathing” or 5 seconds in, 5 second hold, 5 seconds out, 5 seconds hold is probably the simplest to start with.
   • If you have an app on your phone to help like Breathe2Relax that allows you to set inhale, exhale and hold times, a pace with a longer hold or out-breath like 4 seconds in, 7 hold, 8 out (“4-7-8 breathing”) may be more effective, as heart rate speeds up a bit on the in breath and slows down on out.
   • If you want to maximize that effect of the heart rate slowing down on the out breath, there are apps that will tune this to your individual physiology.
     • My favorite is HRV4Biofeedback by researcher, blogger and ultra endurance athlete Marco Altini. I am not affiliated, I just think he and his apps are among the best in terms of making it easy, and telling you the how and why along with the limitations. It’s a $5 purchase but well worth it if you have that to spare.
     • Another free alternative that requires a separate heart rate strap like a Polar H10 is EliteHRV. I’ve found it more finnicky and less reliable than HRV4Biofeedback though. They also have a podcast that features some other experts in relaxation and physiology (although possibly also some guests who may be prone to misinformation or pseudoscience, so be cautious what you take in).
     • A ballpark average if you want to try this technique without measuring biofeedback is 4 seconds in and 6 out with no pause ³. That’s roughly the population-wide average optimum. It varies widely though. Again on average bigger people will benefit more from slower and smaller people from faster, but try it and find out what feels the best.
3. Progressive or paired muscle relaxation – IF you can avoid targeting specific areas that activate traumatic or other deeply negative responses.
   • Pick a part of the body where you want to start introducing some feelings of calm. I like to start with the feet and work up but you’re welcome to experiment. On the in breath, tense muscles in the area you’re focusing on. Focus on the feeling of the tension. As you breath out, release the tension you’ve added and focus on that. Hold the sensations of tension and release in mind as you go. Repeat if needed and then move to other areas.

Other sources describe these as “emotion regulation skills” rather than as “grounding”. I believe they may be among the most powerful and immediate ways to ground ourselves though, for two reasons: they interact directly with the physiology underpinning stress, and they are intense enough on a sensory level that it’s hard to lose track of or ignore what’s going on right now.

Milder exercises may also be good to keep in mind though. If you don’t feel like you’re spiraling or approaching a crisis, it may actually be a healthy step to focus on less intense sensory input that’s a mild challenge to stay focused on. Here are some ideas about how to do that.

1. Humming
   • Make a humming noise while breathing at comfortable pace of roughly 10 seconds total for one cycle of in and out breath.
   • Focus gently on the sensations created in the chest, throat and head by the humming.
   • There is some preliminary research to support this inducing physiological relaxation by a similar mechanism as the heart rate variability breathing I mentioned above ⁴. It also comes up in various yoga practices, which follow a very different way of knowing than scientific research but that I’m willing to place some trust in and that probably resonates if someone’s already asked you to do this during a class.
2. 5-4-3-2-1 sensory counting
   • In your immediate environment, count 5 items you can see, 4 you can feel, 3 you can hear, 2 you can smell, and 1 taste lingering in your mouth.
   • This exercise is far easier than most of the others to do in public or social environments without it being obvious to other people what you’re doing. It also directly exercises focus on immediate experience, which is a skill that benefits so many other aspects of trying to be the best version of yourself.
3. Mindful walking or sitting.
   • As you sit in place or walk somewhere, notice any feelings of weight or lightness as your body makes contact with the ground under you. Do you feel lighter or heavier as you breathe in? Lighter or heavier as you breathe out? As you take a step? Is there any rhythm to these processes during which you feel slightly more relaxed? Experiment with how that momentary sense of very mild relaxation can be expanded or deepened.
   • This exercise can be particularly helpful for conditioning yourself to have more cues during the day to come back to being aware of the present moment without having to specifically focus effort on it. We all get busy or tired sometimes and have other things to attend to, so it’s probably good to have your experience itself occasionally remind you that hey, this is happening right now.

How do I know if it’s working or not?

What we’re after is incremental improvement.

If you’ve felt down, tense, angry, ashamed or some other negative state often over a long period of time, it’d be unfair and unrealistic to expect this to suddenly flip a switch and have everything feeling better.

What’s more likely to happen is that these exercises give you a sense of just a bit more time, space, or agency (a feeling of being in the driver’s seat) after you find yourself in a difficult spot. The usual course of a person’s life improving looks like finding the kind of small moments of openness that grounding can cultivate and then using those to make additional minimal moments of reflection or new habits stick.

It’s probably working if it feels like:

1. I have just a bit more internal quiet.
2. My problems are there but slightly less urgent.
3. I have space to notice and take care of immediate biological needs like using the bathroom, eating or resting.
4. I notice my body doing things like producing saliva that only happen when I can relax.
5. My sense of humor is a little more present.
6. New possible decisions I hadn’t thought about before are bubbling up.

You may either need to try a different kind of grounding, or focus on some other aspect of your life to work on, if it feels like:

1. You notice far more pain or tension than relief, or they get worse than when you started.
2. You feel more on autopilot or outside of yourself (“dissociated”) than before.
3. You have far less energy than when you started and that’s not resolved by normal rest.
4. Feelings of nervous energy, anxiety or panic are more present or on edge than they were before.

Therapy to help integrate and build on self-awareness exercises

This page is intended to help you help yourself as much as you can or want to. Regardless where you land from feeling completely confident with this to not knowing where to start to feeling afraid or unsure about starting at all, I’m also here to help. If you’re interested in seeing if working with me would be a good fit, click the “Contact” button in the upper right of the page and drop me a line.

References

1. Li, P. (2025). Panic Disorder and Regulation of Carbon Dioxide: A Literature Review. Arts, Culture and Language, 1(3). ↩︎
2. Dunne, J., Flores, M., Gawande, R., & Schuman-Olivier, Z. (2021). Losing trust in body sensations: Interoceptive awareness and depression symptom severity among primary care patients. Journal of affective disorders, 282, 1210-1219. ↩︎
3. Kawakami, Yoshikazu, Natelson, B. H., & DuBois, A. R. (1967). Cardiovascular effects of face immersion and factors affecting diving reflex in man. Journal of Applied Physiology, 23(6), 964-970. ↩︎
4. Lehrer, P., Kaur, K., Sharma, A., Shah, K., Huseby, R., Bhavsar, J., … & Zhang, Y. (2020). Heart rate variability biofeedback improves emotional and physical health and performance: A systematic review and meta analysis. Applied psychophysiology and biofeedback, 45(3), 109-129. ↩︎
5. Kim, T., Lee, S., & Woo, M. (2026). Humming Breathing and Autonomic Regulation: A Preliminary Study of Resonance Frequency and Vibratory Mechanisms. Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback, 1-11. ↩︎