Wholeness Healing Center

Anxiety Coping Skills: Bookending

Managing anxiety, especially lately, has become a hot topic, as we often are surrounded by increasing stimuli, magnifying stressors, and growing societal expectations. The reality is that we are not going to eliminate stress, but we can learn to manage it in a better way.

I often teach and encourage the use of hypnosis as a way to manage anxiety and the accompanying reactivity. The hypnosis often involves the implementation of an “anchor”, measured breathing, and visualization. However, visualization in itself can be a tool to manage the anxiety, especially if that visualization involves “bookending”.

Bookending is simply putting your anxious thoughts on a shelf and slapping a bookend on them. The picture of placing your anxiety away, added with giving yourself permission, can be quite powerful. Perhaps you are worried about an upcoming dinner with family. Give yourself permission to let your thoughts run away with themselves for five minutes, considering all that could go wrong, even thinking of numerous scenarios. Then bookend all of them. Picture and imagine, visualize if you will, placing those thoughts on the shelf, putting the bookend up to hold them, and walking away. Sure, you can revisit at any time, but often just the picture and the permission that you can go back any time will allow you the freedom to move forward unencumbered.

Visualization can be freeing, and the “Bookend” allows you the freedom of how long you continue in a spiral of anxious thinking, also allowing you the choice to put it away. Often anxiety stems from our fear of not having control, so when we have the option of using a Bookend, we get to choose how long we stay with the run-away thoughts. We also get to choose if we return to the default script, bringing it up perhaps at a later time when we are in a better place to think through things logically. Often just knowing that we have the choice, that we can picture ourselves putting the anxiety up and walking away, will be empowering enough to allow us to stay in our calm and reasonable states.

Tags: coping skills for anxiety - bookending, managing anxiety