The Worry Time Technique: How Scheduling Anxiety Reduces It

Telling an anxious mind to "stop worrying" almost never works — suppression tends to backfire, making the suppressed thought more intrusive, not less. In 1983, psychologist Thomas Borkovec proposed the opposite approach: instead of fighting worry, schedule it. His stimulus-control treatment, published in Behaviour Research and Therapy, asked chronic worriers to confine their worrying to one fixed daily window and postpone it everywhere else. It sounds too simple to work. Controlled trials say it does.

The Original Study

Borkovec, Wilkinson, Folensbee, and Lerman (1983) tested stimulus control on people who worried excessively throughout the day. Participants were instructed to identify their worrying, delay it to a specific half-hour period, and use that period exclusively for worry — nothing else was allowed to happen there. Compared to a self-monitoring control group, the stimulus-control group reported significant reductions in the frequency of daily worry episodes and improved ability to fall asleep, since bedtime is one of the most common default "worry slots" people fall into unintentionally.

Why Postponement Works

The mechanism has two parts. First is straightforward stimulus control: worry becomes conditioned to specific cues — your desk, your pillow, a notification sound. By consistently redirecting worry to one time and place, you weaken the link between worry and the hundreds of unrelated cues that currently trigger it. Second, the act of successfully postponing a worry is itself informative — it demonstrates, repeatedly, that a worry doesn't have to be processed the instant it appears, which directly challenges the belief (common in generalized anxiety disorder) that worrying immediately is necessary or protective.

A later study by McGowan and Behar (2013), published in Behavior Modification, replicated the core effect: participants instructed to postpone worry to a scheduled period showed significant reductions in worry frequency and state anxiety compared to a no-instruction control condition, even though total available "worry time" wasn't restricted — only its timing was.

How To Run It

1. Set a fixed slot

Pick one 15–20 minute window, same time and place every day. Late afternoon or early evening works for most people — avoid the hour before bed, since that reinforces the exact association you're trying to break.

2. Catch and defer

When a worry surfaces outside the window, write one line describing it — not a full analysis, just enough to release the mental hold — and tell yourself specifically: "I'll think about this at 6pm." Then redirect attention back to whatever you were doing.

3. Actually worry during the window

This step matters and is the one people skip. When the scheduled time arrives, go through the list and genuinely engage each item — think it through, problem-solve where possible, feel whatever needs feeling. Skipping this step turns the technique into simple avoidance, which doesn't carry the same evidence base.

4. Expect the list to shrink

Most people find that by the time the window arrives, a large share of the day's worries have lost their urgency or resolved on their own — a pattern consistent with Borkovec's original findings and one of the clearest signs the technique is working.

Where It Fits

Worry time is a stimulus-control component often used inside broader cognitive behavioral therapy for generalized anxiety disorder, alongside cognitive restructuring and relaxation training. It's not a replacement for therapy in moderate-to-severe GAD, but as a standalone habit it's one of the few anxiety interventions with a direct, replicated evidence trail and close to zero cost or risk. Structured self-help resources such as The Anxiety and Phobia Workbook walk through it alongside complementary CBT exercises.