Practice dropping anchor for… by Caroline Johnson

Dropping anchor for anxiety at work is an ACT grounding practice, and it works best rehearsed two or three times a day while you are calm, not saved for the moment your chest tightens in a meeting. Practiced early, it keeps you steady enough to say what you came to say.

Key takeaways

Grounding skills are far easier to use if you have already run them dozens of times when nothing was wrong.
Anxiety at work has an early stretch (heat, shallow breath, quickening thoughts) that is much more workable than the peak.
Dropping anchor comes from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and uses a short sequence: acknowledge, come back to your body, engage with what is around you.
The goal is not a calm body. The goal is being able to act on what matters to you while anxiety is still present.
No grounding practice fixes an unfair workplace, and it should never replace accommodations you are entitled to.

Most people come to me having already tried to use a coping skill in the worst possible conditions: heart hammering, mouth dry, three minutes into a meeting that is going badly. It didn't work, so they concluded the skill was useless, or that they were bad at it. Neither is usually true. They were attempting a first attempt at high altitude.

Anchoring is a motor skill more than an insight. Nobody learns to swim during a rescue. Yet that is precisely how anxiety skills tend to get tested, and it is why I now spend the first part of teaching this technique talking about when to use it rather than what it is.

Early warning signs of workplace anxiety arrive before the thought spiral does

Anxiety at work has a shape, and it is more of a cascade than a switch. In the sessions I run in Stouffville with adults on stress leave or a staged return, we usually map it backwards together: the meltdown at 2:15 traces to a tight throat at 2:09, which traces to a flicker of heat across the face when a certain name appeared in the calendar invite at 1:40. Somewhere in there the body moved first and the story arrived second.

The story is often some version of they can tell I can't handle this. It rides in on the physical sensations and then feeds them, which is why the whole thing gathers speed. If you have spent twelve months in a workplace where you were treated badly, the story is not paranoia and it is not a cognitive error you can just correct. It is a reasonable conclusion drawn from real evidence, which is exactly why arguing with it in the moment goes nowhere.

Catching the early stretch of the cascade matters because intervention is cheap there and expensive later. At an activation level of three or four out of ten, a ninety-second practice can genuinely hold you. At an eight, most people can manage only to endure. So I ask people to identify their own reliable early signal, and I mean one specific bodily thing: the jaw, the top of the chest, the ears getting hot, the odd urge to check email compulsively. One signal you can actually notice beats a general intention to stay aware.

Dropping anchor for anxiety at work: the ACE sequence in about ninety seconds

Dropping anchor is a short grounding practice from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, usually taught as three moves that stack. First, acknowledge what has turned up: silently name it, something like here is fear, and here is the thought that I'm about to be humiliated. Second, come back into your body: press both feet into the floor, lengthen your spine, push your fingertips together, roll your shoulders, breathe out slowly. Third, engage with the world around you: notice five things you can see, three you can hear, the temperature of the room, then bring your attention back to the task in front of you.

The sequence is not a relaxation exercise, and people are often surprised how much that distinction matters. You are not trying to soften the wave. You are widening your attention so the wave is one thing present in the room rather than the entire room. As the psychologist Stephanie Best writes on her practice blog in a piece on anchoring for anxiety:

> "the goal isn't to stop the storm; it's to keep you from being swept away by it." Dr. Stephanie Best, PhD, on dropping anchor as an ACT grounding exercise (2025)

Anchoring also has a low ceiling and a low floor, which is the point. A 2024 explainer from the anxiety and OCD specialists at State of Mind Therapy frames success as whether you keep moving toward what matters rather than whether your heart rate drops, and I think that framing is the whole ballgame. If you measure the practice by calm, you will judge it a failure on the days it does the most work.

Rehearsing two or three times a day while nothing is wrong is the part most people skip

Practicing when you feel fine looks pointless, so it gets dropped first. I ask for two or three reps a day anyway, sixty to ninety seconds each, attached to something you already do: the kettle boiling, the seatbelt clicking, the walk from the car to the door. What you are building is not calm on demand. You are building a groove deep enough that your body can find it when your thinking has gone offline.

Practicing outside the storm has a second benefit that surprises people. A 2023 post from Holistic Wellness Practice makes the point that you can run this exercise anytime, anywhere, and don't have to wait for distress to blow up. Doing it while regulated gives you a felt reference point, so you learn what "anchored" is in your own body rather than chasing an idea of it. Without that reference, you will keep aiming at the wrong target.

I will also say plainly what I say in the room: two weeks of quiet practice is a more reliable investment than reading three more articles about anxiety. Collecting techniques feels productive and is often a way of staying safely one step away from trying anything. If you have four grounding tools you half know, pick one and get bored with it.

The ten minutes before a meeting with your manager, on a staged return to work

The ten minutes before a hard workplace conversation is where this practice earns its place. A meeting about your accommodations, your hours, your medical documentation, your performance: the anticipation phase is where the cascade usually starts, and it is also where you have the most room to work. I often have people anchor in the car, walk in, and anchor again in the two minutes before they sit down, so their attention is on the person across the table instead of on the surveillance of their own symptoms.

Preparation makes anchoring possible rather than replacing it. We tend to write three or four talking points in your own words, in your own phrasing, so that when your thinking narrows you have something to read off. We also get clear ahead of time on what you are and are not required to disclose, because in Ontario your diagnosis and your clinical details are private health information; your employer's business is your functional limitations and the accommodations you need, not the contents of your sessions. Knowing where that line sits removes a whole category of dread from the meeting.

Then the aim shifts from "stay calm" to something you can actually control. Anchor, notice the fear, and ask what you would say if you were acting from your own values instead of reacting to guilt. Assertive, or generous, or honest, or reasonable: name the quality in advance, one word. People leave those meetings shaky and still say the thing they came to say, and that is a win worth counting even when your hands were unsteady.

When anchoring stops helping: late dosing, pushing anxiety away, and workplaces that will not change

Anchoring fails in three predictable ways, and it is worth knowing them before you decide the skill is not for you. The first is timing: applied at a nine out of ten, ninety seconds of grounding rarely holds, and the honest response is to leave the room briefly if you can, use a longer version, and treat the episode as data about where your early signal actually sits. The second is agenda: the moment you use anchoring to make anxiety leave, you have turned it into another form of struggle, and anxiety tends to escalate when you fight it. Grounding is a way of carrying the feeling, not evicting it.

The third failure has nothing to do with skill. If you are in a workplace where you are being treated cruelly, no amount of practice will make that acceptable, and constant hostility genuinely prevents skill building from taking hold. In those situations I spend as much time on the documentation, the graded hours, and the written clarifications to an employer as I do on any technique. A nervous system cannot learn safety in an environment that keeps disproving it.

Trauma changes the picture too. If intrusive memories, nightmares, or flashbacks are part of what surfaces, dropping anchor is a useful stabilizer, and orienting to the present moment after a nightmare is often exactly the right move. It is not treatment for the memory itself, and the somatic and trauma-focused work usually needs to run alongside it. Anchoring is what makes the rest of the work possible; it is the harbour, not the voyage.

What I hope you take from this is a change in sequence rather than a new technique. Learn it cold, practise it bored, use it early, and stop grading it by how calm you felt. The question is not whether the storm arrived. The question is whether you were still steering.

Citations

Frequently asked questions

Does dropping anchor make anxiety go away?

No. Dropping anchor is designed to keep you steady and able to act while anxiety is present, and sometimes anxiety intensifies briefly before it settles on its own.

Measuring the practice by whether your heart slows down sets you up to abandon a skill that is working. A better test: did you stay in the conversation, finish the task, ask the question you meant to ask? People often report that the sensations were just as loud but they were no longer entirely inside them, which is what "anchored" actually feels like.

How many times a day should I practice dropping anchor?

Two or three short reps a day, sixty to ninety seconds each, is a reasonable starting dose while you are learning it. Practice when you feel fine, not only when you are distressed.

Attaching reps to existing habits makes them stick better than scheduling them. Kettle, car, elevator, the walk from the parking lot. Ten days of that is usually enough for the sequence to become findable under pressure, which is the whole point of front-loading the practice.

Can I do this in a meeting where people can see me?

Yes. Pressing your feet into the floor, lengthening your spine, pushing your fingertips together, and slowly scanning the room are invisible to everyone else in the meeting.

The louder versions (a stretch, a slow exhale, stepping out to the washroom for ninety seconds) are worth keeping for when the quiet version is not enough. Stepping away briefly is a legitimate strategy, not an admission of anything, and it is far better than staying seated while your capacity to think drains out.

Do I have to tell my employer why I need a moment during a meeting?

No. Your diagnosis and clinical details are private health information; what your employer needs is your functional limitations and the accommodations that support you.

Getting clear on that boundary ahead of a meeting takes a surprising amount of pressure out of the room. If a return to work is being negotiated, a letter from your therapist or physician setting out the need for a staged transition carries far more weight than any explanation you improvise under stress, and it keeps the conversation on what you need rather than on what you have been through.

Practice dropping anchor for anxiety at work in the parking lot, not mid-meeting