I worry all day. What helps?
· Source: McGowan & Behar, Behavior Modification, 2013
It starts with the rent at breakfast. On the way to work it’s your mother’s check-up next week. At eleven an email from your manager says “can we talk later?”, and that takes the rest of the morning. By evening there’s a new one about the car. None of these is a disaster, and none of them can be settled right now. They just keep arriving, one after another, and each one feels as if it needs your full attention immediately.
What wears you out isn’t any single worry. It’s that they follow you everywhere, into the shower, the queue at the shop, the middle of a film. You start to feel that worrying is simply what your head does now.
Where the idea of a worry time comes from
Psychologists have tried a surprisingly simple answer to this: don’t fight the worries, but give them an appointment. The approach goes back to Borkovec and colleagues in 1983. As a 2024 trial by Krzikalla and colleagues describes it, Borkovec noticed that worry can become tied to all sorts of everyday cues. People were therefore asked to postpone their worry to a fixed worry period, held at one time and in one place each day.
The thinking behind it is easy to follow. If worry can turn up anywhere, every room and every hour becomes a reminder. If it has one place and one time, the rest of the day has a chance to come back.
The two-week test
One of the clearer tests of this idea came from McGowan and Behar in 2013. They worked with 53 people who worried a lot by habit, high trait worry in the researchers’ terms, and split them at random into two groups for two weeks.
The first group got what the researchers call stimulus control training. Each day they had a 30-minute worry period, limited to a set time and a set place. Worrying was to stay inside that slot. The second group got different advice: don’t avoid worries when they come, so that pushing them away doesn’t make them grow.
That second group matters. It wasn’t a group that did nothing. It was a sensible-sounding alternative: let the worry in and deal with it on the spot.
What changed after two weeks
At the end of the two weeks, the group with the fixed worry period had done better on several measures. They reported less worry, less anxiety, fewer negative feelings and fewer problems with sleep than the group that met each worry as it came.
Some things didn’t differ between the groups. Low mood, measured as depression, and positive feelings didn’t change more in one group than the other. More people in the worry-period group also showed a change in worry and anxiety large enough to count as clinically meaningful.
The authors call their results preliminary, and that’s the right word. It was one study, with two weeks of training and a modest number of people. Still, it points in a clear direction: for these worriers, giving worry a fixed slot worked better than meeting each worry whenever it arrived.
Worry that has an appointment doesn’t need to follow you around all day.
Why putting it off isn’t the same as pushing it away
At first this can sound like the old advice to just not think about it, which usually fails. It’s different in one important way. Postponing doesn’t tell the worry to go away for good. It tells it when it will get your full attention.
The 2024 trial described the attitude it asked people to take. When a worry came up during the day, participants were to accept that it was there and not get drawn into it, while also not trying to control it with their usual tricks. They even wrote a short sentence to help, along the lines of “Another worry arises, I acknowledge it, and now I let it go.” In that study the postponed worry went to a window of no more than 30 minutes later in the day.
So the move isn’t “stop”. It’s closer to “noted, later”. Many people find that easier to keep than a ban, because they aren’t being asked to pretend the worry isn’t real.
Setting one up
None of the steps below were tested together as a package. They’re our advice, put together from the studies above. Pick a time you can keep most days, such as half past five, and a place that isn’t your bed or your desk. A chair by the window works. So does a short walk around the same block.
During the day, when a worry turns up, give it one or two words so you don’t lose it: “rent”, “Mum’s check-up”, “manager’s email”. Then go back to what you were doing. You don’t have to solve it or even feel calm about it. All you need to do is move it to the list.
When the worry time comes, go through the list one by one. Some items will already feel smaller, and some will have sorted themselves out since the morning. For each one that’s left, say what exactly you’re worried about, and whether there’s something you can do. If there is, decide the first step. If there isn’t, say that too.
When the time is up, stop, even if the list isn’t finished. Whatever is left can wait for tomorrow’s slot. That ending is part of the method, not a failure of it.
A day with a worry time
Here is an invented example. Priya sets her worry time for half past five, in the chair under the kitchen clock. At breakfast the rent comes up, and she says “rent” to herself and carries on with her coffee. At eleven the manager’s email lands. She notices her stomach drop, adds “manager” to the list and opens the next task.
At half past five she sits down with the list. The rent turns out to be a calculation she can do in ten minutes, so she does it. As for the manager’s email, it has already been answered: the talk was about holiday dates. Her mother’s check-up is the one she can’t do anything about, so she names what she’s afraid of, decides to call her mother on Sunday, and leaves it there.
By six she’s done. Later that evening the check-up drifts back once. She reminds herself that it has its own place tomorrow, and goes back to her book.
When worry needs more than a time slot
A worry time is a tool for ordinary worry. It’s a different situation when worry fills most of your days for months, when you can’t stop it however hard you try, or when it comes with poor sleep and feeling tense most of the time. That’s worth talking to a doctor or a psychologist about.
The research suggests the same. McGowan and Behar describe this kind of training as a piece of larger treatment, not the whole of it. The 2024 trial notes that so far the evidence has mostly come from people with low to moderate worry, and that results in people with a diagnosed anxiety disorder have been mixed. Someone trained in this can help you work out which approach suits you. Notes from your worry times can help you explain how your days really go.
Try it tonight
- Choose one worry time for tomorrow: the same time, the same place, about half an hour.
- During the day, when a worry comes, give it one or two words and save it for then.
- At worry time, go through the list, decide a first step where you can, and stop when the time is up.
Use Halflight as your worry time. Say what’s on the list out loud, and it writes it down under that date, so tomorrow you can see which worries came back and which sorted themselves out.