Schedule Negative Time & Worry Less | Health Freedom Alliance

Pencil in 30 minutes a day to wallow in your anxieties, study suggests

For those concerned with shedding some of their anxieties, it seems planning a certain time every day to worry may help stop the stress-out cycle.

When people with adjustment disorders, burnout or severe work problems used techniques to confine their worrying a single, scheduled 30- minute period each day, they were better able to cope with their problems, a new study by researchers in the Netherlands finds.

The study made use of a technique, called “stimulus control,” that researchers have studied for almost 30 years. By compartmentalizing worry — setting aside a specific half-hour period each day to think about worries and consider solutions, and also deliberately avoiding thinking about those issues the rest of the day — people can ultimately help reduce those worries, research has shown.

“When we’re engaged in worry, it doesn’t really help us for someone to tell us to stop worrying,” said Tom Borkovec, a professor emeritus of psychology at Penn State University. “If you tell someone to postpone it for a while, we are able to actually do that.”

via Schedule Negative Time & Worry Less | Health Freedom Alliance.