Worry Time

What happens when you give your worries an appointment, why “not now” works better than “stop it”, how to try it this week, what to do when worry turns up at night, and how worry differs from rumination

11 minute read  ·  2,446 words

It’s ten past eleven, you’re in bed, and your mind has decided that this is the moment to go back over the email you sent on Tuesday, the appointment you still haven’t booked, and whether the thing your friend said at dinner meant what it might have meant. None of these can be dealt with from where you’re lying. That doesn’t seem to stop any of them.

Being told to stop worrying rarely helps, and most of us have already tried telling ourselves exactly that. A more useful idea has been around since the early 1980s, and it sounds a little odd at first: give your worries an appointment. You pick fifteen to thirty minutes, at a set time and in a set place, and when a worry turns up at any other point in the day, you tell it that it’ll be heard, just not now.

This is called worry time, and it’s one of those techniques that sounds almost too simple to work. The interesting part is why it works at all.

Worry time, sometimes called worry postponement, grew out of work by the psychologist Thomas BorkovecThomas BorkovecAmerican clinical psychologist at Penn State University whose research shaped how worry and generalized anxiety disorder are understood and treated. Worry postponement grew out of his work. and his colleagues. They noticed that for people who worry a lot, worry had stopped belonging anywhere in particular. It could start in the shower, at a traffic light, halfway through a conversation or the moment the light went off at night. Almost anything could become a cue for it.

Their idea borrowed from what was already known about how habits are learned. If worry has become attached to nearly every situation, the goal is to shrink the number of situations it’s attached to. They called this stimulus control, and the instructions they gave back then are very close to what people still use today.

That’s the whole method. There’s no special notebook, no app you have to buy, and no expectation that you’ll stop having worries. The worries are allowed. They’re simply given a place to go.

It’s easy to hear this and assume the point is to avoid difficult thoughts, but it’s closer to the opposite. You’re not refusing the worry. You’re promising it your full attention later, at a time when you can actually give it some.

Trying not to think about something keeps it close

Try not to think about a white bear for the next minute, and notice what turns up. In the famous white bear experiment, people told not to think about one kept thinking about it, and it came back even more once they were allowed to. To make sure you’re not thinking about something, part of your mind has to keep checking for it, and that checking keeps the thought within reach. When you’re stressed, tired or distracted, the checking tends to win.

Postponing sidesteps that problem. Instead of asking your mind to stop producing the thought, you give it a time and a place, which is a much easier instruction to follow than “never”.

Worry learns where it lives

Worry is partly a habit, and habits attach themselves to places and times. If you’ve spent many nights going over the next day in bed, bed itself can start to feel like a signal to begin. Worry time slowly teaches the opposite: worry happens here, at this time, and not everywhere else. That’s also why the choice of place matters, and why the one place worry time shouldn’t happen is where you sleep.

Many worries shrink while they wait

Something surprising tends to happen when people first try this. By the time the appointment comes around, a good number of the worries on the list no longer feel urgent. Some have been answered by the day itself. Some turn out to have been a mood rather than a problem. A few still matter, and those are exactly the ones worth your time.

There’s research that fits this. People with generalized anxiety disordergeneralized anxiety disorderA condition in which worry is frequent, hard to control and spread across many areas of life, most days for at least several months, often with tension, tiredness and poor sleep. kept a worry journal for ten days as part of a treatment study, and later checked what actually happened. More than nine in ten of their worries didn’t come true, and the people who saw this most clearly improved the most.

It was a small study of 29 people, so it tells us about that group rather than about everyone. But it does help explain why a worry that seemed enormous at eleven at night can look quite different at six the next evening.

Worry keeps the body on alert

Worry isn’t only something that happens in your head. Researchers call the repetitive thinking behind worry and rumination perseverative cognition, and a large body of work suggests it can keep your body braced long after the moment has passed: a faster heart, higher blood pressure and more of the stress hormone cortisol.

So the hours that worry no longer fills may also be hours in which your body gets a proper break.

Setting up the appointment

Pick a time you can realistically keep on most days. Early evening works well for many people: late enough that most of the day’s worries have had a chance to turn up, and early enough that there’s time to wind down before bed. Fifteen to thirty minutes is enough. The studies used thirty, but fifteen is a fine place to start, and you can make it longer if you keep running out of time.

It also helps to decide in advance exactly what you’ll do when a worry appears. In one trial, people who made a specific if-then plan, like “if I notice I’m worrying before six, I’ll write it down and save it for worry time”, spent around fifteen minutes less a day worrying than people who postponed their worries without one.

What to do during worry time

Go through the list one item at a time. For each worry, ask a practical question: is there anything I can actually do about this? If there is, decide on the next small step and when you’ll take it. If there isn’t, admit that it’s out of your hands, at least for now. And if the worry has already sorted itself out, cross it off, which is more satisfying than it sounds!

When the time is up, stop, even if you’re in the middle of something. Anything unfinished can go on tomorrow’s list. Stopping on time is part of the practice, because it teaches your mind that the appointment has an end as well as a beginning.

When a worry can’t wait

Some worries really do need something today: a bill that’s due tomorrow, a call you have to return, a lump you want checked. Worry time isn’t about ignoring those. If something needs doing today, do it, and postpone only the worrying about it. Make the call, pay the bill, book the appointment, and then let the going over and over wait until six.

The first week is the hardest

Most people find postponing awkward at first. The worry arrives, you write it down, and five minutes later it arrives again. That’s normal, and every time you notice it and set it aside again counts as practice, not failure. It usually gets easier once your mind has seen, a few times over, that the appointment really does happen.

It works for children too. In one study, 9- to 13-year-olds who saved their worries for a half-hour slot in the evening had fewer worrying thoughts afterward, which makes it a nice thing to try together as a family.

A notepad by the bed

Night is where a lot of worry happens, because there’s nothing else to hold your attention. If a worry arrives in bed, don’t try to solve it there. Keep a notepad and pen by the bed, write it down in a few words, add “tomorrow at six”, and turn the light back off. Writing it down seems to tell your mind it’s been caught and won’t be lost. You don’t need to keep it in your head overnight to keep it safe.

Empty your head before bed

Two small studies suggest the evening is a good time to get things out of your head. In one, people who spent five minutes before bed writing a specific to-do list for the next few days fell asleep faster than people who wrote about what they’d already done. In another, students with sleep problems who wrote down their worries in the early evening, along with a possible next step for each, felt less keyed up at bedtime.

Both fit the idea of worry time: give your worries somewhere to go before bed, so they don’t have to follow you into it. If sleep is the bigger problem, there’s more on how insomnia keeps itself going in the article on sleep.

Before a big moment

The same idea can help before an exam, an interview or a difficult conversation. A few minutes of writing down what you’re worried about can help you put a name to it and set it down before you walk in.

An early set of studies found that students who wrote about their exam worries beforehand did better, but larger attempts to repeat those studies found no benefit. So treat it as something worth trying rather than a proven fix. If it helps you feel steadier, that’s reason enough.

Forward and backward

Worry and rumination are close relatives. Both mean going over the same ground again and again. Worry usually looks forward, to what might go wrong. Rumination usually looks back, at what’s already happened and why, and it’s especially closely tied to low mood.

Not all going over things is harmful

Going over things isn’t always bad for you. A large review of the research found it’s linked to depression and anxiety, but also to recovering after upsetting events and to good planning. One thing that seems to decide which way it goes is whether the thinking is abstract or concrete. Asking “Why does this always happen to me?” tends to keep people stuck. Asking “What happened, and what could I do next?” is more likely to lead somewhere.

That’s what the questions during worry time are for. “Is there anything I can actually do about this?” is a concrete question, and it turns going over something into deciding something.

When it’s more than everyday worry

Worry time is a useful tool, and it’s often one part of cognitive behavioral therapycognitive behavioral therapyA structured, present-focused therapy that works on the links between what you think, how you feel and what you do. It usually involves practice between sessions. rather than a treatment on its own. If worry is taking up large parts of most days, making it hard to sleep or work, or coming with tension, restlessness or low mood, it may be generalized anxiety disorder, which is common and very treatable. Talking therapy for it works well, and you don’t need to have tried everything else first.

One exception: if the thoughts are frightening, feel out of character, and come with checking, rituals or asking for reassurance, they may be OCD. Writing them down or giving them an appointment can then feed the loop, so read our article on OCD before trying worry time with them.

You’ll still worry. Everyone does. What changes is where it happens: less in the shower, at the traffic light, halfway through a conversation or on the pillow, and more at six o’clock, in a chair, with a pen, where you can actually look at what’s on the list. Your worries still get their turn. They just stop getting all of it.