Dropping Anchor: A Simple Grounding Exercise to Help You Feel Steady When Anxiety Takes Over
- Sarah Cosway | BABCP
- 2 days ago
- 8 min read
Updated: 4 hours ago
Learn why your mind isn't your enemy and how to build a personal toolkit for staying present when things feel overwhelming.
Maybe you know the feeling.
A storm of emotion that's overwhelming, all-consuming; the kind that makes it difficult to focus on anything else while it's going on.
Perhaps for you, anxiety feels like it's constantly just around the corner, which carries its own particular heaviness; that sense of bracing for what might be coming next.
Perhaps you find yourself hyper-vigilant, constantly scanning and anticipating the next wave. Or you lie awake worrying with a million thoughts running through your head, one bleeding into the next.
For some people, anxiety is a very physical thing, an overwhelming rush of sensations caused by adrenaline and cortisol flooding the body. For others, it's more about the "what if" thoughts; getting lost in a black hole of anxious thinking that seems to have no floor.
If any of that sounds familiar, I want you to know that you are not alone!
And the situation is definitely not hopeless. You can take back control...even if right now that feels very hard to believe.
In this blog post, I want to share one of my favourite practical anxiety tools.
It is a simple, genuinely easy grounding exercise called Dropping Anchor that you can use anywhere, any time, to help you feel steadier when anxiety hits.
I'll explain why it works, and then invite you to try it for yourself with a free guided audio practice.
Meet Your Inner Meerkat
To understand why anxiety happens, and why grounding works for anxiety, it helps to go back....way back...to where we came from.
We weren't really designed to live in the modern world.
Anxiety is part of our self-preservation system, something that developed over millennia when we lived a hunter-gatherer lifestyle; when we were, in the most literal sense, natural humans.
This part of our brain (let's call it the threat system, or as I like to think of it, our inner meerkat) has one job and one job only: to keep us safe.
And here's the thing.
Your mind is not your enemy. It is not bullying you. It is actually trying to help you.
The problem is that the inner meerkat doesn't understand the subtleties and nuances of modern life. It operates on a simple "better safe than sorry" approach, because for the version of us that lived thousands of years ago, survival was all that mattered.
So when your boss sends you a message saying "can you pop into my office?", your inner meerkat doesn't pause to consider that you might be about to be praised for a piece of great work.
It immediately catastrophises and jumps to the worst-case scenario...because that's what it's wired to do.
And right now, with a constant news cycle full of conflict and uncertainty beamed directly into our pockets via our screens, the inner meerkats of an entire global population are on high alert.
That part of our brain doesn't understand that we are safe at home, looking at events unfolding thousands of miles away through a screen.
It responds as if the threat is real and immediate, because as far as it's concerned, it might be.
The result?
We feel on edge. Worried. Anxious.
Not because something is wrong with us, but because we have a very ancient brain trying its best to navigate a very modern world.
When the inner meerkat is activated, our nervous system responds accordingly. Adrenaline and cortisol flood the body, creating all those uncomfortable physical sensations (the racing heart, the tightness in the chest, the feeling of being wired and on edge).
Our rational brain, the part that can weigh things up and think clearly, gets a little crowded out.
What it needs...what we need...is for someone to gently stroke the meerkat. To let it know that it can relax a little. That it doesn't need to be quite so hyper-vigilant right now.
That's exactly what grounding techniques like Dropping Anchor are designed to do.
By reconnecting with the present moment and the physical body, we begin to calm the nervous system; the adrenaline and cortisol start to reduce, the physical symptoms begin to ease, and the mind starts to find a little more space to breathe.
You Can't Control the Storm — But You Can Drop Anchor
If you've been living with anxiety for a while, there's a good chance you've tried lots of things to make it go away.
To get rid of it.
And it's worth pausing for a moment to ask yourself honestly: how effective has that been?
The approach I want to introduce you to today is a little different. Rather than fighting the storm, we're going to change our relationship with it.
Imagine you're out at sea in the middle of a wild storm.
You have two choices:
You could try to control the weather to stop the storm from happening.
Or you could take action to look after yourself and stay as steady as possible until the storm passes through on its own.
No one can control the weather. But dropping anchor? That, we can do!
An anchor doesn't make the storm disappear. The boat still gets buffeted about, the waves still crash, the wind still howls. But the anchor holds the boat steady. It prevents it from being swept away and lost at sea.
And crucially, the storm always passes. It-always-does.
That's exactly what this exercise is designed to do for you. Not to get rid of anxiety immediately, but to give you something solid to hold onto while it moves through.
To help you feel steady enough to function, to breathe, to choose what comes next, rather than being swept along by the current.
Dropping Anchor — A Practical Grounding Exercise for Anxiety You Can Use Anywhere
Dropping Anchor is a grounding exercise from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) — a third-wave CBT approach that builds on the foundations of traditional CBT with mindfulness and compassion-based strategies.
It uses a simple framework called ACE to help you remember the steps.
And one of the things I love most about it is that it doesn't feel silly. There's nothing you need to do that will draw attention to yourself. You can use this inconspicuously at your desk, on public transport, in a supermarket queue...anywhere.
Here's how it works:
A: Acknowledge your thoughts and feelings. Not push them away, not judge them, just notice that they're there. Think of it like a radio playing in the background of your mind. You don't have to do anything with the radio. You don't have to change the station or turn it off. You can simply notice that it's playing, without getting tangled up in what it's saying.
C: Come back into your body. Press your feet into the ground. Feel the weight of yourself in your seat. This is where the physical grounding begins, reconnecting with your body and the present moment you are actually in, rather than the one your anxious mind is catastrophising about.
E: Engage with your environment. Look around you. What can you see? What can you hear? What can you feel, smell, taste? Name things, notice things. This brings you back into the room, into the here and now, and out of your head.
The exercise is flexible. There are both long and short versions, so you can adapt it to your circumstances and personal preferences.
With practice, you'll be able to use just the ACE framework as a quick, in-the-moment tool whenever anxiety hits.
Notice a thought spiralling?
Acknowledge it, press your feet into the ground, look around and engage with where you actually are...all in a matter of moments, without anyone around you even noticing.
But (and this is important!) getting to that point takes practice.
I always encourage people not to wait until they feel they need it before they try it.
If you only reach for this tool in moments of high anxiety, it will feel unfamiliar and far less effective...you may not even think of it at all.
Practice it when you're calm: when you're making a cup of tea, sitting in the garden, waiting for the kettle to boil.
That's how it becomes a genuine go-to tool that you can pull out of your anxiety toolkit when you need it most.
A Note on Feeling Silly
I want to address something, because I hear it a lot:
"Will this actually work for me, or will I just feel daft doing it?"
It's a fair question. Grounding techniques can sound a little strange on paper...pushing your feet into the floor, naming what you can see.
But here's what I'd say: anxiety is already making you feel pretty uncomfortable, and trying something new for five minutes costs only the time.
What I've seen, again and again with clients who have been in real distress (overwhelmed, convinced they can't cope) is that exercises like this one genuinely help them feel more in control and more able to engage with what matters to them.
Not because it's magic, but because it works with your nervous system rather than against it.
Give it a try before you decide.
Ready to Give It a Go?
I've created a guided audio recording to walk you through the long form of this exercise — around eight minutes — so that I can guide you through it until you feel confident enough to do it yourself.
Find somewhere comfortable, press play, and let me take you through it:
You Are More in Control Than You Think
Anxiety can make it feel like your emotions are completely in the driving seat, like you're being swept along with no say in the matter.
I hope that after reading this and trying the exercise, you're starting to feel a small but real sense that it doesn't have to be that way.
That there are tools.
That you have more agency than anxiety wants you to believe.
That feeling of steadiness is available to you. It just takes a little practice.
If your inner meerkat has been particularly busy lately and you feel like you could do with some support, please don't struggle on alone. Reaching out is a sign of strength, not weakness, and a free 15-minute call with me costs nothing but a little courage. I'd love to hear from you.
Stay anchored.
The Dropping Anchor technique was developed by Dr Russ Harris, a world-renowned trainer in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). You can find more of his work at Act Mindfully.
Content last reviewed: April 2026
About the author: Sarah Cosway is a BABCP-accredited Cognitive Behavioural Psychotherapist with over a decade of experience working in mental health, both within the NHS and in private practice. She offers tailored CBT in a compassionate, collaborative environment, empowering clients to build resilience and manage their mental well-being with confidence.
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