“People are using adjectives like ‘blood bath’ and ‘devastation,’ but we are talking about a negative 3 percent return,” said Mr. Kinniry, referring to the Vanguard Total Bond Market Index fund, which is down by that amount year-to-date.

Even the big bond market sell-off in 1994, which many refer to as a “massacre,” doesn’t seem quite as violent as that moniker suggests. As Mr. Kinniry points out, the same index fund lost 5.3 percent that year, after interest rates spiked by 2.83 percent. If the same sort of situation were to play out now, he said the returns would be significantly worse because bond yields are lower than they were back then. “You might lose about 8 percent,” he said, adding that losses could be deeper depending on how quickly rates rose, among other factors. But typically, “we’re talking about single-digit losses.”

Still, some advisers suggested taking a closer look at your overall allocation to stocks, particularly if you’re not well diversified, since bonds will provide less protection.

For most investors, holding bonds through low-cost index funds remains the most prudent course. People who invest in individual bonds don’t have to worry about fluctuations in their price because they can continue to hold the bond and collect their interest payments until maturity, at which point they’ll collect its face value (unless, of course, the bond issuer defaults). But you need to have a good pile of cash — some experts say $500,000, even more — to assemble a diversified portfolio of municipal and corporate bonds (though you don’t need quite as much for Treasuries, since they’re backed by the government).

You can figure out how sensitive your fund is to interest rates by looking at its duration, which essentially measures how long it will take to receive all of your money back, on average, from interest and your original investment. Generally speaking, for every percentage point that interest rates rise (or fall), a bond’s value will decline (or increase) by its duration, which is stated in years. Bond funds with shorter durations are less susceptible to interest rate risk — the faster a bond matures, the thinking goes, the more quickly you can reinvest the money at a higher interest rate.

That means a fund like the Vanguard Total Bond Market Index fund, which has a duration of 5.5 years, would decline by about 5.5 percent. But since the fund also pays investors income — it has a yield of about 1.7 percent — it would actually only post a total loss of about 3.8 percent. (Future returns would be one percentage point higher, too, thanks to the rise in rates).

But if even that feels too risky, experts say you can put some of your bond money into a diversified index fund with an even shorter duration. The trade-off, of course, is that you will earn less income. That might not matter once you remind yourself why you own bonds at all.