Anxiety Tip: Give yourself some worry time

A trick from a friend

Today we’re talking about anxiety and a little trick I learned from a friend. Yes here’s a little trick from me, an anxiety counsellor in NZ.  She heard this from a podcast called choiceology or something like that. I have yet to look them up but I do intend to.

It was a little trick that she heard on this podcast and she tried it out and she said it was amazing. So the trick was to give yourself some worry time.

Assign a specific time in your day for worrying

So set aside some time that will be your worry time. Maybe from 4 o’clock to 10 past 4, every day and then whenever worries come up, then you say to yourself: I’m not gonna worry about that now, I’ll worry about that at 4 o’clock. 4 o’clock’s my worry time. Maybe you’ll even write a little list of things to think about at that later time. 

Put off worrying about things until that assigned time

The point is that you give yourself some time to worry, and you put off worrying about things and maybe at 4 o’clock you will spend some time thinking about that thing. But maybe you’ll be like my good friend and find that you don’t actually need to.

Simple to implement

Doesn’t that sound simple? And does it sound effective? It sounds like one of those magical things that shouldn’t work and shouldn’t really make any difference. But my friend found it did! She found it really helpful.

It’s worth giving it a try!

I think it sounds like it’s definitely worth a try. You have nothing to lose!  If you suffer from anxiety decide for yourself, that you will have a framed out worry time. Worry time will be from here to here.  Stop reading now,  what time will you assign as your worry time for the day?

You can decide how long it needs to be, but I wouldn’t suggest longer than half an hour. Half an hour would be a long time to sit worrying about something. But we know as people with anxiety, we do often do that. We often spend all day worrying about things.

So give it a try and let me know how it goes. And maybe you want to try out the podcast choiceology.  And maybe you will finally make a little bit of change to your anxiety. There’s lots of good little tricks you can do and this has been one of them.