Give Your Worry an Appointment

Breathing exercises, check. A gratitude journal in a drawer with three entries in it, check. How many of those stuck? You’re right, maybe none, and that isn’t anyone’s fault. So, one more. This one runs a little bit backwards.

Give your worry an appointment. A time, a chair and a timer, nothing fancier.

A houseguest with no room

When we give worry no place to be, it takes every place there is. It shows up during the meeting, during the drive, during the part of the night where your body is in bed and your head is at work. It can feel as if it’ll turn up whenever it likes, a houseguest with no room to go to.

Inside the fifteen minutes

Choose a time, not a nice one but a boring one, say 4:15 on a weekday when nothing much is happening. Not bedtime. That is where worry already tends to turn up. The place is up to you, as long as it isn’t your bed or your desk. The kitchen table works. So does the car in the driveway.

Then, every day, when 4:15 comes, sit down with a timer set for fifteen minutes and worry on purpose. Think your worries or say them out loud, all of them, in any order. Yes, even the silly ones. Sometimes the silly ones are the loudest!

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When the timer goes, you get up. That’s the appointment, start to finish.

Is that really it? Nearly. What’s left is keeping the appointment on the days the worry would rather talk now. A worry with an appointment can wait.

Everything after 4:15

The rest of the day is where it works. At ten in the morning, when the worry taps you on the shoulder in the middle of something, you don’t have to argue with it. Just say, “Not now. 4:15.” Then go back to what you were doing. The same words work at midnight, in bed. That is when the worry is loudest.

Does the worry disappear? No such luck. What it can learn, slowly, is that it has a slot. A thing with a slot may stop needing every other minute of the day.

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It won’t feel like it’s working on the first day. The second day it’ll feel a little less silly. If you can do it for a week, it starts to be a thing you do, like locking the door at night.

This is for the looping kind of worry. If yours is the kind that takes over everything, the kind that won’t wait until 4:15 and doesn’t stop when the timer does, the appointment can still be a place to begin. That kind is bigger than a timer, though, and it’s what I do in the room. I’d be glad to help with that.

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So, choose the time, choose the chair and keep tomorrow’s appointment even if today’s felt ridiculous. Miss a day? That’s okay, pick it up the next one.

One thing doesn’t have to wait for 4:15, and that’s asking for help. You can do that any time. When you’re ready, request a time or write to me.

On solid ground,

Acelli