Dropping Anchor as a First Line Intervention

Name: Dropping Anchor as a First Line Intervention
Uploaded: 2025-11-16T00:06:10.000Z
Description: Russ Harris discusses Dropping Anchor, a practical mindfulness skill for clients who struggle with traditional meditation

Russ Harris discusses Dropping Anchor, a practical mindfulness skill for clients who struggle with traditional meditation

From the course

ACT for ADHD

So as a first line intervention for distractibility or disengagement or both, I'm a big fan of dropping anchor. Why? Well, it's easy to teach. It's easy to do. It's probably the single easiest mindfulness skill to teach just about anybody and it's great for people who have problems with meditation which is let's face it, most of us, you know, a lot of people find meditation boring, tedious, difficult. And if you've got clients that find it hard to sit still, hard to focus, they are really gonna struggle with that. Dropping anchor is a mindfulness skill that doesn't involve meditation. It gets you moving your body, engaging with the world. It's very interactive with the therapist. It's also a really good trauma sensitive mindfulness skill Given that many of our clients will have a chronic trauma background, we can instantly start teaching them a trauma sensitive mindfulness skill that we can then use later in therapy to deal with dissociation and flashbacks and overwhelming emotion and extremes of fusion. So it's very practical for a lot of different issues. Another cool thing about it is that it actually introduces a whole lot of ACT processes and principles and concepts in the format of a really simple exercise. You'll recall that you can create literally hundreds of different dropping exercises all based around the simple ACE formula. The A, acknowledging your thoughts and feelings. The C, connecting with your body or connecting with a physical movement. And the E of engaging in the world around you or engaging in what you're doing. And you can cycle through the basic ACE and it doesn't have to be that order. It can be CEA or AEC and so on and so on. And you can create exercises of any duration as short as thirty seconds, as long as ten minutes if you want to. In fact, with lots of practice, people can do this in ten seconds, five seconds, even two seconds. So it becomes a very easy mindfulness technique to incorporate into your daily routine. And, you know, one of the big challenges we often have with ADHD clients is how do we help them to actually practice this stuff and remember to do this stuff and build it into their routines? So as we shall see, there's lots of things we can do to help them incorporate dropping anchor throughout the day. They don't have to put aside time to meditate.