Book Review: Put Your Anxiety Here: A Creative Guided Journal to Relieve Stress and Find Calm by Lisa M. Schab

This is a journal with prompts for activities to help you reduce feelings of anxiety and increase feelings of peace in your life. The prompts vary in style with some asking for limited physical activity (stand and shake out your stress until your body feels relaxed), while most ask you to write or draw something. Many of them ask you to write down or think about what’s creating anxiety and then either distract you from those thoughts or have you work through the thoughts until they change into more peaceful ones.

Everyone approaches self-help differently and the style that works for me may not work for you. I liked that the book starts with some tips for how to use the journal, emphasizing that the purpose is to help relieve your anxiety. There’s no wrong way to use it. You can follow the prompts, or not, as long as you end up feeling more peaceful after your time with it.

I found myself alternating between following the prompts as written and adjusting them to fit my mood/way of thinking. For example, one prompt asks you to write something that makes you smile for each letter of the alphabet. As I was going through the letters I found myself writing in a lot of activities I enjoyed instead. And the more I thought about each activity - and the joy doing them brings me - the less anxious I felt.

I was surprised that there wasn’t a page at the beginning for writing a general list of things that make you feel anxious. I found a few prompts later on that asked you to write some down, but wanted something right at the start to help me focus on what I was working towards eliminating. So I took one of the mostly blank introduction pages and made my own list there. I found that writing down information for one activity allowed me to see my anxiety in more helpful ways. That by looking at one aspect of the problem I was able to look at the bigger picture and it didn’t seem so insurmountable anymore. I made a few breakthroughs in terms of how I think about anxiety and how I can deal with it in the future. Not every prompt worked for me. I skipped a few, though I may return to them in future sessions.

The journal ends by asking you to rate they type of prompts that helped you the most, so you recognize the style that worked best for you for follow-up guidance.

I would recommend looking at the book first and trying one or two activities to see if this style of journal/self-help book works for you. Personally, I found it a very helpful journal and really appreciated a lot of the prompts and the things I learned about myself by following them. I can see myself using some of these techniques - and even the same prompts - in the future when anxiety hits.