Grounding Techniques You Can Do While Wearing Spanx

You're in a dress that cost more than your first car, wearing shapewear that's rearranging your internal organs, and your aunt just cornered you to ask when you're having babies. Your feet hurt. You can't take a full breath. Your ribs are compressed. And you're supposed to be present for this, the most photographed day of your life...

The Body Under Performance Conditions

Let's be specific about what's happening to your body right now. You're wearing a structured garment (possibly boned, definitely tight) that's restricting your ability to breathe into your belly. You're in heels that change your center of gravity and put constant strain on your calves and lower back. You might be wearing shapewear that's literally compressing your organs. Your hair is shellacked into a style that requires you to hold your head a certain way. You've been told not to slouch, to keep your shoulders back, to smile with your mouth closed because it photographs better.

Your body is under physical constraint. Sustained, deliberate, aesthetic constraint.

And then someone tells you to "just be present" or "take a deep breath and ground yourself."

Traditional grounding techniques, (feeling your feet on the earth, taking a deep belly breath, noticing the sensations in your body) are borderline useless when you physically cannot do any of those things. Your feet are in four-inch heels on a hard floor. You cannot take a deep belly breath because there's industrial-grade elastic around your ribcage. The sensations in your body are primarily: constriction, pain, and the urgent need to pee but you can't because the dress situation is too complex.

Your nervous system is trying to regulate under conditions that would make a yoga teacher weep.

The Wedding Day Fugue State (And Why It Happens)

Here's what actually happens: you dissociate.

Not in a dramatic way. Not in a way anyone notices. But you leave your body because your body has become an uncomfortable place to be. You watch yourself from slightly outside yourself. You smile on cue. You turn when the photographer asks. You say the right things at the right times. And six months later, you look at the photos and have almost no memory of the moments they captured.

This isn't a personal failing. This is how nervous systems work under sustained physical constraint plus emotional intensity plus constant observation.

Memory formation requires embodied presence. You have to actually be in your body, sensing what's happening, for your brain to encode the experience properly. When you dissociate, when you float slightly outside yourself as a protective mechanism, those memories don't form the same way. The photos exist. Your body was there. But you weren't there.

Research on interoception (your ability to sense your internal body states) shows it's directly linked to emotional regulation and memory formation. People with higher interoceptive awareness process emotions more effectively and form clearer episodic memories. But interoception requires being able to actually sense your body. And when your body is compressed, constrained, and in pain, your nervous system has a choice: stay present with the discomfort, or leave.

Most people leave.

Add to this the proprioception problem. Proprioception is your sense of where you are in space. It's what lets you know where your limbs are without looking at them, how your body is positioned, how you're moving through the world. It relies on feedback from your muscles, joints, and movement. When you're required to stand still in an unnatural position for extended periods, when your normal range of movement is restricted by your clothing, your proprioceptive sense gets disrupted.

You start to feel untethered. Floaty. Not quite real.

This is the wedding day experience for a lot of people. Performance mode instead of participant mode. Watching yourself instead of being yourself.

Five Techniques That Work in Formal Wear

The techniques that help aren't the ones you'd use in a yoga class. They're designed for bodies under constraint, for moments when you can't move freely or breathe deeply or do anything that would be visible to the 150 people watching you.

The Sternum Press

Place your thumb against your sternum (the flat bone in the center of your chest) and press. Firmly. Create a point of pressure, of sensation, of something happening in your body that you're choosing.

This works because it creates a focal point for interoceptive awareness. You're giving your nervous system something specific to pay attention to, activating pressure receptors, bringing sensation back into a body that's started to feel numb or disconnected.

No one can see you doing this. It looks like you're adjusting your necklace or touching your chest absently. But you're creating an anchor point, a place to return to.

Deploy this during photos, especially the third hour of family photos when you've stopped feeling your face. Or during the receiving line when you're shaking hands with your mother's college roommate and have no idea what to say. Or literally any moment you notice yourself floating away.

Peripheral Vision Expansion

You're probably in tunnel vision right now without realizing it. When your nervous system perceives threat your vision narrows. And 150 people staring at you registers as a threat, even when they're smiling... You focus on one point, one face, one thing directly in front of you.

Peripheral vision expansion is the antidote. Keep looking straight ahead, but soften your gaze. Stop focusing so hard on what's directly in front of you. Notice what's in the corners of your vision. The edges. The periphery.

Research on gaze patterns and nervous system states shows that peripheral vision activates your parasympathetic nervous system (also known as rest and digest). Tunnel vision activates your sympathetic nervous system, the threat response mode. By deliberately expanding your visual field, you're sending your body information that you're safe enough to take in the whole scene instead of laser-focusing on a single threat.

Use this when you're standing at the altar suddenly aware that everyone you've ever met is watching you. When you're overwhelmed by the sheer number of people, the attention, the weight of being perceived.

You don't have to do anything with your eyes that anyone would notice. Just soften. Expand. Let the periphery back in.

The Jaw Release

You're clenching right now. I can't see you, but statistically, you're clenching your jaw.

Here's the technique: create a tiny space between your back molars. Let your tongue drop from the roof of your mouth. Relax the muscles at the hinge of your jaw.

You can do this while smiling for photos. While talking. While eating. No one will notice. But jaw tension is a direct line to your stress response. The temporomandibular joint—where your jaw connects to your skull—is surrounded by fascia that's connected to your neck, your shoulders, your entire upper body tension pattern.

When you release your jaw, you're signaling to your system that you're not preparing to fight or flee. Clenched jaw = ready for conflict. Released jaw = safe enough to relax.

Check in with your jaw every ten minutes. During toasts (especially during your father-in-law's speech that's going off the rails and you're frozen in polite attention). During dinner. During dancing. Always.

The Finger Trace

This one's subtle enough to do anywhere. Use your thumb to trace each finger on your opposite hand. Slowly. Start at the base of your pinky and move up one side, across the tip, down the other side. Then the next finger. Then the next.

This works for several reasons:

• bilateral stimulation, you're activating both sides of your body, which helps integrate left and right brain hemispheres

• proprioceptive input, you're giving your nervous system clear information about where you are in space

• gives your mind a task, something to focus on besides the overwhelm.

You can do this under the table during dinner. While holding your bouquet. While sitting and waiting for the ceremony to start. Anywhere you have your hands available and thirty seconds.

Deploy this when you're three glasses of champagne in and losing the plot during toasts. When you're sitting through the ceremony feeling like you might cry or laugh or scream and you're not sure which. When you need something to anchor to that isn't the swirl of emotion and sensation.

Micro-Movements

Your body wants to move. It's designed to move. Standing still for extended periods (especially in an unnatural position, in heels, in a restrictive dress) goes against everything your nervous system wants to do.

So move. Just make it small enough that no one notices.

Tiny rotations of your ankles. Shifting your weight from one foot to the other. Micro-movements of your shoulders, your wrists, your fingers. Movement so small it's almost imperceptible, but your body registers it.

Even minimal movement maintains proprioceptive awareness. It keeps your nervous system oriented in space. It prevents the full dissociation that happens when you're forced to stand completely still while your internal experience is screaming.

Deploy this during the receiving line, as you have to endure 45 minutes of standing, smiling, greeting people whose names you've forgotten. During photos when the photographer is adjusting lights and you're required to hold position. Any moment you're supposed to be still but your body is vibrating with the need to move.

The physics of this matter. Your nervous system needs feedback. Movement provides feedback. No movement means no feedback, which means your system starts to float, to disconnect, to leave the body that's not giving it information anymore.

What Actually Helps (Beyond Techniques)

These techniques buy you moments of presence. They interrupt dissociation. They give you tools for a body under constraint.

But here's what would actually help: designing your wedding day around your nervous system instead of just your Pinterest board.

Building in structured moments to metabolize what's happening. Not just bathroom breaks, but actual time alone to feel what you're feeling without performing it. Five minutes in the getting-ready room with the door closed. Three minutes in your car before you walk into the venue. Time that's protected, that no one can access, where you can drop the performance and just be.

Having a person whose only job is to notice if you're dissociating. And this person isn’t your partner or maid of honor, both of whom are busy and also performing. Instead, someone who knows you, who can see when you've left your body, who can touch your arm and bring you back. Someone with permission to interrupt and say "take a breath" or "are you ok?"

Giving yourself permission to close your eyes during the ceremony. Even for three seconds. Even when everyone's watching. The radical act of prioritizing your internal experience over the external performance.

These aren't standard wedding planning considerations. But maybe they should be.

We've designed weddings to make embodied presence nearly impossible. Physical constraint, sustained observation, performance pressure, emotional intensity, all happening consistently for hours (up to months). And then we're surprised when people don't remember their own weddings.

You can't perform presence. You can only create conditions that allow it.

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These techniques help. But if you're already anticipating that your wedding day might feel more like an out-of-body experience than a lived moment, and if you want someone to help you design the day around your actual nervous system instead of just the aesthetic, let's talk.