Give Your Worry an Appointment

Worry rarely waits for a convenient time. It turns up in the middle of a meeting, on the drive home, in the shower and very often in the dark at two in the morning. Each time it arrives we give it the floor, because it feels urgent and it sounds responsible. A mind that worries everywhere ends up with no place where it is allowed to rest.

This post is about a simple practice from behavioral psychology that treats worry as something to schedule rather than something to fight. It also covers what the research behind it does and does not show.

Worry has learned too many cues

Think of the mind as a system that links behavior to the context it happens in. If you only ever work at your desk, the desk becomes a cue for work. If you worry at your desk and in bed and in the car and over dinner, every one of those places becomes a cue for worry. Psychologists call this poor stimulus control, and it describes a habit that can be triggered by almost anything.

Thomas Borkovec and his colleagues described a way to rebuild that control in a 1983 paper in Behaviour Research and Therapy. Their idea was to give worry a fixed place and a fixed time, then gently move it there whenever it shows up somewhere else. The practice has a plain name in the research: stimulus control training for worry. Many people know it simply as worry time.

What a more recent study found

A useful controlled test is a 2013 study by Sarah Kate McGowan and Evelyn Behar in Behavior Modification. They randomly assigned 53 people with high levels of worry to one of two approaches for two weeks. One group set aside a 30-minute worry period each day at the same time and in the same place, and postponed worry to that period the rest of the day. The comparison group was told not to avoid worry when it came up naturally.

After two weeks, the scheduled group showed larger drops in worry, anxiety, negative mood and insomnia than the comparison group. More of them also showed a change large enough to count as clinically meaningful on the worry and anxiety measures. The study did not find a difference on depression or on positive mood.

The honest limits

That was a small study that lasted only two weeks, and the authors called it preliminary. It measured people with high worry and not people with a diagnosed anxiety disorder, and it relied on questionnaires. The authors framed it as one useful part of a larger treatment rather than a treatment on its own. That is how I would frame it too.

Worry time will not make a real problem go away, and it is not a way to ignore something that needs action today. If a worry points at something you can do right now, the honest move is to do it. Scheduling is for the loops that repeat without producing anything new.

If worry or anxiety fills most of your days, keeps you awake night after night or comes with a low mood that does not lift, please take it to a doctor or a licensed counselor. That is a better next step than any scheduling trick.

Why postponing can work better than suppressing

Telling yourself to stop worrying tends to keep the topic in view, because you have to check whether you are still thinking about it. Postponing asks for something smaller. You are not denying the worry or arguing with it. You are telling it that it has a time and a place, and that this is not it. Many people find that easier to do in the moment than trying to shut a thought down.

There is a second effect worth noticing. When the appointment arrives, some of the worries that felt urgent at noon feel smaller at five, and some have already resolved. That gives you real information about how much of the day the worry was actually worth.

For Leaders

Teams pick up their sense of urgency from the person running them. If every concern you have reaches your people the moment it crosses your mind, through late messages and drive-by questions, you are teaching the whole team to worry everywhere. A fixed weekly risk review gives those concerns a place. Write them down as they come, bring them to that meeting, and let the rest of the week be for the work.

For Individual Contributors

When a work worry interrupts a task, write it in one line on a notepad or in a note on your phone and go back to what you were doing. Hold the list for your worry period later that afternoon or evening. When the time comes, read each line and decide whether there is a next step. If there is one, put it on tomorrow's list. If there is not, cross the line out.

The rep

Pick a 20 to 30 minute slot for tomorrow, early enough in the evening that it is well before bed, and pick one chair to do it in. During the day, when a worry shows up, write it down and tell yourself it has an appointment. At the scheduled time, sit in that chair and give the list your full attention for the whole period. Look for a next step on each item, and when the time is up, stop.

Try it for two weeks, the same length as the study, before you decide whether it earns a place in your routine. Treat it as an experiment rather than a cure.

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Reference: Borkovec, T. D., Wilkinson, L., Folensbee, R., & Lerman, C. (1983). Stimulus control applications to the treatment of worry. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 21(3), 247-251. https://doi.org/10.1016/0005-7967(83)90206-1

Reference: McGowan, S. K., & Behar, E. (2013). A preliminary investigation of stimulus control training for worry: Effects on anxiety and insomnia. Behavior Modification, 37(1), 90-112. https://doi.org/10.1177/0145445512455661