ACE (or ‘dropping anchor’) from Acceptance & Commitment Therapy
I found this exercise while reading ‘ACT Made Simple’ by Russ Harris (though I’d recommend ‘The Liberated Mind’ by Steven Hayes first as a book on ACT). It helped me, so I thought I‘d share it in case it might help someone else too.
(Note — if you’ve experienced trauma or are in a very bad place mental health wise, it could be damaging to do mindfulness exercises without professional guidance. Keep safe ❤ )
Anyway, the acronym for this one is ACE:
A — Acknowledge
C — Come back into your body
E — Engage with your environment
I’ll go through how I do it, but many changes can be made depending on personal preference, e.g. you could sit, stand, lay down or walk. It could take just a moment, or however long you want. I generally set a timer for 15 minutes and go through the exercise 2–3 times.
A — Acknowledge
Sit in a comfortable, balanced position. Close your eyes. Just listen for a sec and feel how you are. What has come up? This could be thoughts, feelings, aches & pains or what have you.
Once you’re aware of what’s there, note these things to yourself to acknowledge them. For example ‘I’m noticing it’s hard to breathe’, ‘I’m feeling a sense of dread’, or simply ‘slight headache, frustration’, etc.
(I like to also acknowledge how much they suck, and remind myself that I did not choose to feel like this and it’s not my fault. That’s not from the book, but I like to do it.)
C — Come back into your body
Choose to do something with your body, and do it. E.g. press one or both of your feet into the floor, wiggle your knees, stretch, stand, push your fingers together, shrug shoulders, clench your butt cheeks. Do a few of these, noticing how it feels to do them deliberately.
E — Engage with your environment
Running through the senses, what is here? Touch: pressure of your butt on the seat? Can you feel any of your clothes? A breeze? Moving on, are there any smells or tastes? What sounds are there? How loud, and from what direction? And sight: slowly open your eyes and name a few objects in the room. What materials are they made out of?
After taking a look around and hopefully noting your body feeling more a part of the space you’re in, you can finish. Or close your eyes and see if anything new has come up, to start the exercise again.
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I find this one is good to do at the start of a day as it really helps me to focus on the day’s tasks (whether it’s work or a day off, it’s much happier to be able to focus decently on either!). It’s great to do on a morning walk.
It should be said though that this is not in any way an exercise to make anxiety go away. It might lessen up as a side-effect, but generally the point of this is to take the anxiety that’s, say, sitting right in front of your face and obscuring the view, and moving it so it’s down by your side. Still there, but you’re more likely to be able to engage with other things more successfully.
A further thing I like about this one is that it’s about acknowledgement, rather than acceptance.
I can acknowledge how I am right now. Full-on acceptance can feel like too much sometimes, so I think it’s kinder to drop back and just acknowledge, rather than getting caught up in ‘why can’t I accept this?!’.
Acknowledgement also drops the struggle against the anxiety, which in itself should reduce the overall stress of the situation, as we create a ton of extra suffering by struggling against things that it’s impossible to fight head-on.
