Worrying Can Lead to Anxiety and Sleepless Nights (The Weird Hack to Get More Peace)

What if I have cancer?

What if my client hates my work?

What if I can’t make enough money?

Sometimes I worry and mostly they are fleeting thoughts and they don’t turn into anxiety. The worst cases are when I keep thinking about them and they distract me from a current task and even affects my sleep.

Do you worry? What is worry?

It’s making future predictions of the consequences we think is going to happen - and you know what? Most of the time, nothing happens.

The truth is that worrying is natural. It’s when we continuously get distracted by them and start to worry about the worrying that it becomes a problem. These are the core symptoms of General Anxiety Disorder (GAD) - getting distressed about the worrying and perceiving it to be harmful.

“I worry too much, it’s causing me stress and making me sick. I’m losing control.”

This gets us into a negative loop of worrying and worrying about our worries.

This is a place I don’t want to be.

In my research, I found that instead of “just not worrying” which is not a helpful advice at all, it’s like asking someone “not to think of a pink elephant”, we should rather block time to worry. (See world’s largest pink elephant statue 😂)

If it’s going to happen, if it’s natural to happen, then make time for it to happen, so you can postpone the worry.

Worry postponement was first described in a study by Borkovec, Wilkinson, Folsenbee & Lerman (1983) where it was prescribed as a daily 30 minute task. Subjects were asked to notice their worrying and then choose to delay engaging in the worry until a later scheduled time. Compared to the no-treatment arm, worry postponement led to significant reductions in daily worry.

Watch a short video where Nir Eyal, book author of Indistractible, describes this technique to help you not get distracted by your worries.

I will layout the technique in detail and also talk about a trap we need to avoid.

BASE PRINCIPLE

Postpone your worry to a scheduled time.

WHAT IF?

What if we could easily manage our worries? What if we are free to worry and never have it distract us? What if instead of being controlled, we were in control?

Another study that is more recent added a component to worry time which I found fascinating. In 2021, 50 people in Florida State University participated in the research study where half of them went through an online protocol where they alternated worry writing with positive writing during their scheduled worry time.

What they found was that this group of participants had:

• 29% fewer negative intrusions

• 36% lower self-reported general worry

• 25% lower self-reported depressive symptoms

My intuition tells me that when I have a specific task and routine in the time blocked out for worry, I’ll probably do better, instead of just tending to my worries for 20 min with no set task.

THE ADVANCED 3 STEP WORRY-TIME PROTOCOL:

Step 1: Designate time

• Find a time and place where you can come back to daily (e.g. 8pm, study.)

• This should be a unique and comfortable place where you won’t get distracted by other things.

• Make sure this is a convenient time, where you can actually take time to do it.

Step 2: Postpone worry

• Throughout the day, when worry comes, label it in your mind and jot it down on a sticky note or note pad.

• Tell yourself that there is an allocated time later to address it.

• Know that there will be discomfort and your job is to sit with it while staying present with your current task - postponing your worry doesn’t mean you’ll stop worrying, altogether!

Step 3: Alternate worry and positivity

• The exact protocol from the study is HERE.

• The pattern is:

  • 4 min tend to your worries

  • 4 min positive writing

  • 3 min tend to your worries

  • 3 min positive writing

  • 2 min tend to your worries

  • 4 min positive writing

  • 2 min tend to your worries

  • 5 min positive writing

• That’s 27 min of time, where you decrease the time worry writing and increase the time with positive writing in each set.

• Only spend time on the ones you wrote down throughout the day, if it doesn’t feel like a worry any more, move to the next one.

• For positive writing, you can write about things like:

  • What am I grateful for?

  • Who do I appreciate?

  • What am I doing that gives me joy?

  • What should I do to connect with someone?

  • What activity was hard but I pushed through?

  • What can you do to help someone?

  • When did you feel loved or appreciate?

TRAP 😨

One of the traps for this is thinking you should suppress worry instead of postpone it. The difference?

Suppressing worry looks like: “I worry that I’m falling ill. I need to stop thinking about it. Oh gosh I can’t, it’s not stopping!”

Postponing worry looks like: “I worry that I’m falling ill. Ok, I’m jotting down, worry about falling ill, I will address it later, but I really hope I’m not falling ill!”

When we try to suppress our worries, the more we will worry, that’s a trap to avoid.

I hope this can help you deal with your worries!

See you next Sunday!

Live your legend 🤘🏽,

Howie Chan

Creator of Legend Letters

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Sources:

1. Borkovec, TD., et. al., Stimulus Control Applications to The Treatment of Worry, Journal of Behaviour Research and Therapy, 1983 - LINK​

2. McDermott, Katherine A., Disengagement Training for the Treatment of Pathological Worry: A Preliminary Test, Journal of Behavioral Therapy, January 2021 - LINK​

3. Kecmanovic, Jelena, A New Way to Reduce Worrying, Psychology Today, January 12, 2021 - LINK

4. ​Center for Clinical Interventions, Postpone Your Worry PDF - LINK

5. Shang, Worry Postponement - Why it Hasn’t Worked For You and How to Do It Instead, Meta Cognitive Therapy Central - LINK

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