Reducing Anxiety with Zentangling

I wrote a post before about how Zentangling is a concrete way to reduce your anxiety. It’s a wonderful technique. Here’s a quick video about it as well or if you want to just read the transcript of the video, it’s below! Enjoy!

Transcript

Hi I’m Dr. Elizabeth Bonet with floridapsychotherapy.com. Today I’m going to talk a little bit about zentangling for anxiety. It’s basically anxiety reduction. I use a lot of different techniques. Most therapists do, for anxiety reduction, when we’re doing treatment.

One of those is to figure out a way to help calm yourself in the moment and do an actual activity. Sometimes you can calm yourself by just doing a breath and that’s very effective. Other times your body actually needs to do something.

I learned about zentangling a couple years ago, actually as something to do because I was so bored doing

Zentangling calms the mind.

Zentangling calms the mind. Zentangle by Dr. Liz

homework at the table with my kids. But they needed me to sit there and do their homework with them. I couldn’t read because, you know, you’re helping them. You’re being interrupted constantly. So I picked up doodling and drawing, and wanted to get better at that, and discovered zentangling, and then discovered that this is a really calming activity. It’s been very very helpful for lots of people and my clients. So I’m going to show you what that looks like.

You get these little tiles, zentangling tiles and order them. I’ll put some links in the notes about how to order those. On this side it’s branded, on this side it’s not. You don’t have to use these tiles, you can do zentangling anywhere, a sheet of paper, a drawing book, whatever you have. These are also often helpful though, the tiles. This is a pattern that you can develop.

You can see this isn’t perfect. There’s nothing great about it. But it’s just drawing. These are little ones, they’re called little bijou zentangle tiles. They’re super cute. Blank on the other side. You use the other side to draw.

This is one I did. Sometimes I spill out onto the front side. Here’s another one. On the front side sometimes I date them and just put my initials so that I know when I did it. I keep them, I often give them away. I’ll do this at conferences often to just relax my mind, let the information come to me a different way, and I’ll give it to someone sitting beside me who likes it.

Because once you start doing these, you start doing it all the time. Again it’s really helpful if you can feel the anxiety rise and then whew . . . You can do something to take that anxiety down. That’s something that’s engaging your mind, it’s engaging your hand. It reduces the heart rate, it gets you to focus on something mindfully. Mindfullness is another part of anxiety treatment. You’re focusing mindfully on something. You’re creating.

If you suffer from anxiety . . . even if you don’t . . . give it a try.

Overcoming toxic parents and borderline personality disorder symptoms with Dr. LIzI specialize in hypnosis, anxiety and helping adult children of toxic parents feel more stable. To see if we’re a good fit to work together in the Broward County and the Fort Lauderdale / South Florida area, schedule your free consultation at 954-309-9071.

Yours in health,
Dr. Liz