NLP Anchoring Exercise: Setting an Anchor on Yourself

This NLP exercise is designed to give you personal experience with the anchoring process and help you distinguish between your states of consciousness. Primarily, these exercises are based on biofeedback, where the feedback comes from your own sensory channels.

Part I — Anchor for “Uptime”

1. Find a place, indoors or outdoors, where you can sit or walk for a while and enjoy the world around you.
2. As you observe your surroundings, focus and tune your awareness to the external world through each of your representational systems:
   • Observe your environment—use both panoramic and focused vision, noticing different objects, colors, and movements around you.
   • Feel the air temperature, the sensation of your clothes, the shape and firmness of objects in your environment, sensations on your skin and deep in your muscles as you sit or move through the world.
   • Listen to differences in tone and location of various sounds around you—notice changes in your breathing, the pitch and tempo of any voices nearby.
   • Smell the air and objects around you—notice both sharp and subtle scents, and, if you wish, any changes in taste sensations in your mouth.

   As you access each of these systems, you can close off other channels—close your eyes, use earplugs, or pinch your nose in various combinations. Make sure you access each system as fully as possible, without internal dialogue, images, or sensations.

3. With your right hand, grasp your left wrist. Once you feel you have accessed each system in turn, squeeze your wrist—as firmly as you can, in proportion to how fully you can access the sensory channel you are using. The more clearly you can see, hear, feel, or smell the world around you, the tighter you should squeeze your right wrist.
4. Begin to tune all representational systems at once so your attention is fully focused outward through your sensory channels. Squeeze your wrist as tightly as you can, based on how successfully you do this.
5. Repeat the process until simply squeezing your wrist is enough for your attention to automatically shift outward to the world around you, without any conscious effort.

Part II — Anchor for “Downtime”

1. Find a place where you can sit or lie down and be alone with yourself.
2. Turn your attention inward and access your internal experience in each of your representational systems:
   • Listen to internal voices, dialogues, melodies, or sounds in your head. Compose tunes and conversations, and recall things you’ve already heard.
   • Use your mind’s eye to see situations and details of objects and events you imagine or have seen before.
   • Feel internal sensations. Pay attention to the similarities and differences between emotional and visceral bodily sensations, and memories of things you’ve felt with your hands and skin. Imagine what sensations would be like from invented events and things.
   • In your imagination, smell and taste objects and places you remember or have invented.

   Again, access each system separately and as fully as possible. You can try a simple task—imagine getting up from where you are sitting and opening a door, engaging each system in turn. First, visualize opening the door, then go back and talk yourself through it or hear the sounds internally; then go through the sensations of each action, and so on.

   Many of you may notice that during this exercise and Part I, you can access some representational systems more easily than others—it may be easier for you to feel sensations than to tune into internal dialogue or create internal images, or vice versa. Treat this as feedback, showing you which systems you need to develop, expand, or practice.

3. Clasp your hands together. When you feel you can access each representational system as fully as possible, squeeze your hands together—as tightly as you can, to fully access that system.
4. Begin to access the internal part of all representational systems at once (you can focus all your senses on one experience, or tune each system to a different experience—see one thing, talk to yourself about another, feel something else, and smell something unrelated to the other three). Squeeze your hands together as tightly as you can, based on how successfully you do this.
5. Repeat the process until simply clasping your hands together is enough for your attention to automatically turn inward, without any conscious effort.

As you do this exercise, pay attention to the cues and differences that allow you to access representational systems and distinguish between them and the states you create. These anchors are very valuable, as they will give you quick access to the full sensory experience of external orientation for gathering information (“uptime”) and to the full richness of internal experience for processing information (“downtime”).

You may also want to set anchors for other states and experiences, such as relaxation, creativity, motivation, etc. This pattern is used in any biofeedback process. A specific state is identified. When a person accesses the state, feedback is given through a specific stimulus—such as how tightly a fist is clenched (kinesthetic), or through tone (auditory), or light/color intensity or hand position on a circular scale (visual) in other biofeedback processes. After a while, the feedback stimulus and the target state become associated (the stimulus becomes an anchor for the state), so that simply providing the feedback stimulus triggers the target state.

You can also experiment with internal anchors. For example, if you want to easily access a state of relaxation each time, you can start by vividly seeing a certain color in your mind’s eye. Allow your body to relax as much as possible, slowing your breathing and relaxing tense muscles. When you reach the desired state, notice how the color you imagine changes to one that best illustrates that state (for example, from orange to blue). You can also let the color change location (watch as the color seeps into your stomach, for example). Practice until you can access the state of relaxation just by imagining the color. Then, when you notice you are tense or anxious and want to have a choice in those situations, all you need to do is close your eyes for a moment, take a deep breath, and imagine the desired color—this will give you access to the desired state.

Many forms of meditation include auditory anchoring, such as mantras and chants, to access downtime or relaxation states. Words or sounds are repeated as a person enters the state. Later, repeating the sounds easily triggers the intended state.

By the way, if you want to reprogram or “get rid of” any anchors you’ve set, all you need to do is collapse one anchor with another anchor or experience. For example, you can squeeze your wrist at the same time as triggering another anchor or while being in a different state. However, remember: when you trigger the anchor you want to reprogram, it will also affect your current experience, so when reprogramming yourself, make sure you choose anchors, states, and/or experiences of equal intensity and strength compared to the anchor you are changing.

If you want to strengthen an anchor, make sure you choose a sufficiently unique stimulus so it won’t be accidentally triggered and integrated with others.