5-4-3-2-1-Whoa!

A simple grounding exercise you can do anywhere, any time

Jun 11, 2025

Last week, I wrote about a 5-4-3-2-1 mindfulness technique for helping you to break habitual behaviors. Here’s another one that can be useful for dealing with anxiety. It’s also a great technique for helping you become more aware of your surroundings - what yoga and meditation teachers call “being present”.

The 5-4-3-2-1 method is a versatile technique that you can use literally anywhere, whether you're on your way to work, sitting in a meeting, taking a walk, or simply relaxing at home. What you do is to engage each of your senses in turn, and notice:

Five things you can see
Four things you can hear
Three things you can feel
Two things you can smell
One thing you can taste

You can employ a certain amount of flexibility here. For example, if you’re doing this at night while lying in bed, you probably can’t see much. If you’ve been sick, you may have lost your sense of smell. And taste can often be challenging, depending on where you are and what you’re doing. So feel free to re-order them to suit the environment: if you can’t see much, then focus on what you can hear and feel.1

If necessary, rely on your imagination or memory: if you can’t taste anything right now, try to recall the last thing you ate or drank, or a favorite meal, or what you plan to have for dinner. Try to be as detailed as possible: if you’re thinking about chocolate, try to recall the sensation of biting into it, how it feels on your tongue, the way it melts in your mouth, and how it made you feel afterwards. While that doesn’t work for being aware of your situation, it does have the effect of focusing your mind on a specific sense.

Sometimes it can take a while to collect all those sensations. I live in a very quiet place, and it’s often almost completely silent out here in the woods, especially at night. (Not during frog mating season, though. Then it gets really noisy.2) But if I wait long enough, I’ll hear the creaks of the roof, maybe the skittering of squirrels, perhaps a train in the distance, or maybe the cats will start pacing around or the furnace will kick on. If it’s really quiet, I can hear my own breath, and sometimes even my own heartbeat. But that just means I need to be patient and really pay attention to my surroundings, which makes the exercise even more effective.

How does it work?

At its core, the 5-4-3-2-1 method cultivates mindfulness by encouraging a heightened awareness of bodily sensations: by shifting your focus to the present moment, it helps you break free from anxiety-provoking thought patterns - the so-called “worry spiral” - and reduces the physiological effects of stress, like the activation of the ‘fight or flight’ response.

If you’re in an over-stimulating environment, it helps you to step back from what you’re experiencing and treat things more dispassionately. The sound of your neighbor cutting their grass or their kids screeching, or the smell of someone cooking chili just become things to be noticed and filed away. You’re not responding them to them emotionally, but observing them analytically, which creates a sense of calm.

This type of practice also offers an opportunity to become more aware of how your body is feeling. By focusing on your senses, you start to notice when things don’t feel right. This can then prompt you to engage in self-care practices, such as deep breathing exercises or stretches.

It’s also an easy way to get into the practice of mindfulness. When done regularly, this can have a big impact on both your mental and physical well-being. Research also suggests that reduced sensory awareness is closely linked to depression. If you feel disconnected from the world, you’re more likely to feel sad and lonely, and you’ll be more prone to overthinking and self-criticism.3

There’s plenty of research showing that these types of simple awareness techniques can reduce anxiety and depression, enhance emotional regulation, and stimulate creative thinking.4 Additionally, they contribute to building cognitive reserve, the brain's ability to cope with damage or aging, which makes us more resilient to age-related decline and neurodegenerative diseases.5

So, just take a few seconds, and notice what’s around you.

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