Worry Time: Scheduling the Thing You Cannot Stop
Fifteen minutes a day set aside for deliberate worrying. It sounds too simple to work and is among the better-supported behavioural techniques.
Worry time is a behavioural technique that sounds too simple to be worth doing, and it has held up better than most things that sound more sophisticated.
The method
Pick fifteen minutes at the same time each day. Late afternoon or early evening, and not close to bedtime.
During that window, worry deliberately. Write the worries out, follow them, take them seriously.
Outside the window, when a worry arrives, write it in a list and tell yourself you will attend to it at the scheduled time. Then return to what you were doing.
Why it works
Three things appear to be going on.
Containment. An unbounded worry has no natural end. A bounded one does, and knowing there is a defined slot makes deferring feel less like suppression.
Exhaustion. Worries survive on intermittent partial attention. Given fifteen minutes of full attention, most of them run out of material surprisingly quickly.
Sorting. Written down and revisited hours later, the difference between an actionable problem and unproductive circling becomes obvious in a way it never is at the moment the worry arrives.
What most people find
Roughly half the worries noted during the day have dissolved by the time the window arrives. The ones remaining tend to be either genuinely actionable, in which case you now have a plan, or genuinely unresolvable, in which case naming that helps.
Getting it wrong
Two common failures.
Skipping the window. Deferral only works if the deferred-to slot actually happens. Miss it repeatedly and the mind stops accepting the promise.
Doing it in bed. The window needs to be somewhere that is not where you sleep, for the reasons the sleep page sets out.
Give it two weeks. The first few days feel contrived, and that passes.