We were talking with a patient recently, let’s call him Brian, who suffers from recurrent anxiety, which disrupts his sleep. He explained the technique that has helped him significantly improve his sleep quality: scheduled worry.
Scheduled worry is a simple technique that many of our patients swear by. Instead of allowing worrisome thoughts or issues to float randomly to your mind at any time of the day or night, you just set a time to let them in. If they come back at an unscheduled time, you just tell the thought: “Sorry, you have to wait, it’s not your turn now.” Sounds almost too simple, but it works!
Brian shares that this is an especially important way to handle work-related anxieties. They should be dealt with on work time, not personal time. An important “life hack” for worrying is to write down everything that comes to mind that causes worry or anxiety. When you make a list in this way, you find that the scary things in life are finite. Once they are committed to writing, you can analyse them using rational parts of the brain, instead of allowing them to stimulate a “flight or fight” response.
Brian still has anxieties in his life, both at work and in his personal life, but he keeps them in their place by scheduling specific times during the day to focus on them, giving him more quality time in the rest of his day for productive work, play and rest. He has also found that taking this small measure of control over nighttime worries allows him more quality sleep time, and he even notes that if he does get less than seven hours’ sleep one night, he can usually make up for it the following night, contributing to an overall positive sleep pattern.
Scheduled worry is actually a type of mindfulness, although we usually think of mindfulness practice as more meditative, or “think of nothing”. But mindfulness is really about knowing yourself and being aware of what you’re thinking about and why. Unbridled thoughts can float around and distract you when you don’t need distraction, or the thoughts themselves can be the cause of anxiety. Putting them in their place, and giving them due attention, but not more will have positive effects in other parts of your life as well.