Feeling Adrift? Grab and Anchor!

When we have a strong emotional response to someone or something (aka “get triggered”), we quickly drift away from our best-feeling selves and into emotional reactivity. We get hijacked by aspects of ourselves that use reactive strategies like getting angry, running away, giving up, or attempting to please others. We use these reactive “survival strategies” in order to get out of the discomfort of the triggering situation as fast as possible. While no one enjoys getting triggered, it can be particularly challenging for lawyers and judges, as we like to think of ourselves as calm, cool, and collected. Our jobs often require that we maintain a professional appearance of being stable and anchored even when aspects of lawyering (and the world at large) is full of people, things, and situations that can trigger us and pull us out of our best-feeling selves.

Grabbing an anchor is a simple yet effective tool to release us from our reactive survival strategies and return us to feeling and acting like our best selves. The practice of anchoring connects us to experiences or activities that ground us in a state of stability, safety, and/or calm. While anchoring techniques can vary, the overarching goal is to utilize former positive experiences to ground and center us in the present moment.

When we “grab an anchor,” we use physical, emotional, mental, or spiritual cues to remind us of what it feels like to be our best selves. When we are anchored, we can think clearly, make good choices, problem solve effectively, and feel well. In essence, staying connected to our anchors helps us access the key aspects of ourselves that we need to be effective lawyers or judges.

Here’s one technique to help you identify and grab your anchors:

1. Draw a large square and divide it into four equal-sized parts.
2. Label the four parts with these categories (one category per quadrant):
1. Physical
2. Emotional
3. Mental
4. Spiritual
3. Under each category, make a list of at least five things that you have done in the past or you do now that bring you back to a calm, stable, grounded state. For example, under the physical category, you may write “take a walk, stretch, nap, deep breathing, swim.” Under the emotional category you may list, “talk to my friends, watch a funny movie, play with my pet, watch a sunset, listen to my favorite music.” Under the mental category, you may write, “listen to a podcast, read a book, sit in quiet, talk out solutions with my partner.” Under the spiritual category, you may list, “meditate, pray, journal, read inspirational quotes.”
4. The next time you feel yourself getting triggered or feeling adrift from your best self, notice and pause.
5. Then choose one of the anchors from your four quadrants and do a few minutes of that anchoring activity. If you don’t have time to do that anchoring activity in the moment, you can imagine you’re doing one of the anchoring ideas from one of the categories on the list (believe it or not, imagining it may help just as much as actually doing it!). Extra credit if you can discern if you’re physically, emotionally/relationally, mentally, or spiritually adrift and then grab your anchor from that specific category!
6. Notice how you feel after grabbing at least one anchor from your list. See if you can find at least two small ways in which you feel just a little bit better.

The quicker you catch yourself feeling triggered or adrift, the sooner you can resource yourself with your anchors and the faster you will start feeling more like yourself again. The longer amount of time you give yourself to resource with your anchors, the better you’ll feel. A few minutes of anchoring can make a significant impact: starting small is better than never starting at all!

Sample Anchor Chart

Laura Mahr is a North Carolina and Oregon lawyer and the founder of Conscious Legal Minds LLC, providing well-being consulting, training, and resilience coaching for attorneys and law offices nationwide. Through the lens of neurobiology, Laura helps build strong leaders, happy lawyers, and effective teams. Her work is informed by 13 years of practice as a civil sexual assault attorney, 25 years as a teacher and student of mindfulness and yoga, and seven years studying neurobiology and neuropsychology with clinical pioneers. Find out more about Laura’s new course, “How to Rock Your World: Five Tools to Get Grounded When the World Feels Rocky” by contacting Laura at consciouslegalminds.com.

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