Why Children Should be Taught 'Grounding' Techniques From a Young Age

"Grounding from a young age enables lower stress levels in the future"

'Grounding' is a technique often used as a coping strategy to stay, or bring yourself into the present moment. Many people use grounding techniques to overcome traumatic experiences, deal with emotions or help battle mental health disorders.

Grounding has been around for many years but in this day and age, an easier option for many to deal with emotions, trauma and mental health is to turn to some form of medication instead of applying natural remedies to every day life.

Grounding techniques include:

• Deep breathing exercises

• Spending time in nature

• Walking barefoot outdoors

• Swimming in open waters

• Taking part in yoga

• Meditation

  
  

Deep breathing exercises

The aim of deep breathing is to calm the nervous system, increasing the feeling of calmness. There are many different deep breathing exercises you can perform. You can use the link below to find breathing techniques to help you feel grounded:

https://www.healthline.com/health/breathing-exercise 

Spending time in nature

Spending time in nature has been proven to reduce cortisol levels (a stress related hormone), therefore spending time in nature acts as a natural way to reduce stress. By reducing stress we are bringing our body into a state of relaxation, feeling more grounded and present in the moment.

Walking barefoot outdoors

Walking barefoot outdoors works as a magical grounding technique, bringing benefits such as: a decrease in inflammation, an instant mood booster, a natural anti-depressant, feeling calm, calming the nervous system, pain relief, and feeling grounded. The earth is full of electrical charge, ions, which work like a charge for the body. When we walk outdoors barefoot, whether it being mud, grass or soil, we recharge our body in a natural way.

Swimming in open waters

This is a perfect way to ground, as through open water swimming we can still take in the same electrons we do from walking outdoors barefoot. This can either be done in the ocean, lakes or rivers. Again, a natural way to feel grounded.

Taking part in yoga

Yoga can be used as a relaxation and grounding technique, when we perform yoga we start to deal with emotions and trauma in a different way. There are all sorts of yoga poses, different pose for different relief. Hip stretching yoga poses help release emotional trauma as emotional trauma is known to be stored in the hips. Yoga also helps you deal with situations and guides you back into the present moment, helping the body feel grounded even when presented with a difficult situation.

Meditation

This is a great way of finding your true self. Meditation can ground you in a way where you can start to connect with yourself emotionally and physically.

Should we implement grounding techniques into the school curriculum?

As we bring our children up, we want them to grow up in a way to avoid experiencing mental health issues in adulthood. The way the society is today, most children spend their free time indoors on either tablets or mobile phones, and we wonder why so many teenagers have started suffering with poor mental health, with more and more teenagers getting diagnosed with conditions like depression and anxiety. As a nation our habits of endless scrolling are causing more detrimental issues in the long run. What happened to our children running outside barefoot? The family walks at the weekends? Playing outside in the garden and socialising? The things we used to love are slowly fading away as new social media platforms take up too much of our attention.

It is so important for us to teach our children strategies to reduce the risk of mental health disorders in adulthood. Everything from deep breathing exercises, to yoga, to camping trips in the woods should all be implemented into the school curriculum. Less time on electronic devices and more time out in nature. As the world evolves, the amount of screen time of each individual slowly increases, whilst socialisation decreases. Mental health disorders are so easily diagnosed now a days, and medication prescribed for the slightest signs of anxiety. I want answers.. A simple answer could be pointing to the fact that the medicine industry is worth billions, the more medicine they sell the more money they make. The majority of doctors are not interested in prescribing natural remedies as cures, instead they write out prescriptions and prefer to have the population dosed up on pills for the rest of their lives because it's easier for them to do so.

Let children be children, let them run around barefoot with no shoes on, out in nature. That's how we are supposed to grow up, feeling free and feeling grounded.