Consumed By Worry? Try Scheduling It.

Today's newsletter is all about "planned worry time," a surprisingly effective and evidence-based worry management strategy.

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Yesterday as we drove home from our first weekend camping trip since moving to New England, I noticed my mind begin to shift from delightful images of my children racing across the beach collecting shells to a darker, more disillusioned space. A space consumed by the far-reaching implications of the social and political climate we’re facing… the future that’s ahead of us… the uncertainty I’m feeling as someone who has dedicated the last decade+ to becoming a PhD-level clinical psychologist finally on the unstable precipice of a research career. I’ll spare you the details since that’s not the point of this particular post, but I’m willing to bet I’m not the only one who’s struggled at times to contain concerns about what the future holds.

Introducing — Planned Worry Time! No, this isn’t an onion article. This seemingly paradoxical suggestion is actually an evidence based worry management strategy that’s been a game changer for myself and many I’ve worked with.

First, I want to quickly define terms.

What is worry?

In contrast to rumination (which refers to repeatedly replaying and reliving past events, failures, etc), worry is future-oriented and revolves around potential problems or stressors that might happen. Worry often includes “what if” scenarios, and is our brain’s way of trying to prevent or prepare for bad things that haven’t happened yet.

Worry often gets a bad rap, but some degree of worry is actually beneficial and a part of risk reduction and healthy living. For example, if I have the thought, “I’m worried my child will get a tick-borne illness living in a place with a high prevalence of Lyme-infected ticks” and in response I tuck their pants into socks and do nightly tick checks, that’s worry working FOR me. If I spend my whole day spiraling about how I’m not going to find a tick in time…. they’re going to get Lyme disease… antibiotics won’t be enough… their whole life will be ruined because I moved them across the country for this postdoctoral fellowship… and then I stop ever going outside because of that worry… that’s worry working AGAINST me.

As most of us know, it’s about as easy to simply stop worrying as it is to not think about a white elephant right now. We can’t simply… not think a thing we’re thinking about.

So… what is planned worry time?

Planned worry time is a technique that can help us constrain excessive wellness-sabotaging anxiety by scheduling a specific and limited time during the day to focus solely on those worries.

While ignoring or pushing away worries may intuitively seem like a good strategy, unfortunately this usually backfires. If we don’t have a time set aside to constructively process our worries, worry-prone brains tend to take every possible opportunity to try to do that for us (i.e., constant, life-consuming spirals). By scheduling worry time, we can essentially send a self-validating message of “Hey, I got this. I have this time set aside to consider and problem solve these concerns!”

So how do I do planned worry time?