How to Manage Worries So You Can Sleep Better Tonight
We’ve all got something to worry about at one point or another. Whether it be that exam you’re taking tomorrow, your child’s health and well-being, or that daunting to-do list you have written out for tomorrow, worrying is a part of being human.
Sometimes, worry can seem to take over our lives. We find our brain going a million miles a minute, working through our day to make sure we didn’t miss anything. We find ourselves up all night with our thoughts, wishing we could silence them for just a few hours of shut-eye.
Planning a deliberate worry time may help you finally get some shut-eye at night. I know scheduling your worry doesn’t sound like something you can force your brain to do, but you can by practicing just a few simple steps every day.
How Can Planned Worry Help Me Sleep Better?
Planned worry is a great cognitive or thinking strategy drawn from sleep therapy, formally known as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia. People who struggle to sleep often find themselves up all night with their thoughts racing with worries and ideas.
One of the reasons people struggle to shut their minds off at night is because they have subconsciously conditioned their brains to release all of their worries when it is the time they plan to fall asleep.
The phenomenon is called classical conditioning, in which we subconsciously learn to associate things with each other, even though they are not related. In the case of worry, we have unconsciously trained ourselves to associate our bed and nighttime as a cue to start worrying, planning, and thinking.
Planned worry allows us to train our brains to associate a better time of the day with the time to be worried and to work through problems. It teaches our brain that there is a better time to think, worry, and plan while acknowledging that we can’t control what thoughts pop into our minds, but we can choose how we respond to them.
How to Schedule Your Worry
Training your brain to have a designated time to worry will take practice and patience. Once the brain begins to get the hang of its new worry cues, it will begin to allow itself to shut off when we need it to and will enable us to finally catch that much-needed rest.
Step One: Schedule a Time Dedicated to Worrying. Pick a time during the day that you can dedicate to releasing all of your worries. The time should be consistent because we are training our brain to worry at this time rather than to worry throughout the night.
You don’t need much time to dedicate to your worrying, and a worrying time ranging between 5 to 15 minutes should suffice. If you struggle to stay consistent with your worry time, set yourself a cue, like an alarm, to help you remember.
Step Two: Let the Worries Flow Without Judgment. Grab a journal or open the notes app on your phone and let it all out. Brain dump everything weighing on your mind from that phone call you need to make, that million-dollar idea, to worries about the end of the world. Don’t edit as you write; just let it all out.
Step Three: Categorize Your Actionable Problems and Your Hypothetical Worries. Once all of your worries are written out before you, take the time to figure out which ones are just the what-ifs and which ones necessitate the worrying.
Step Four: Write Down a Small Action for Your Actionable Problems. In this step, take the time to write down a small action you can do to work toward solving the problem. Make this step specific and concrete to check it off your mind’s to-do list.
Your goal is to identify the next, smallest actionable step to address a worry. The task may not solve the problem entirely but will help you move towards finding a resolution, ultimately easing the pressure of having to hold on to that thought.
Here are some examples:
The worry: I’ve got that huge presentation tomorrow for work. I don’t feel prepared. What if I do a terrible job?
The Next Smallest Step: Do another trial run tomorrow at 10 AM. Focus specifically on the content of the 2nd and 3rd slides, and I feel least confident about those.
The worry: I am worried about my child’s future, and they’ve really been struggling.
The Next Smallest Step: Tomorrow, I will find time to talk with my partner this week about how we can support our kid through this challenge.
The worry: I feel really lonely. Is this the way it’s going to be forever?
The Plan: I will call my sister tomorrow at 5 PM to check-in. Next week, I’ve made a note to talk to my therapist about these feelings.
The idea: I’ve got this revolutionary idea for modern underpants!
The Plan: Do a quick sketch and discuss with the design team tomorrow at 10 AM or let go of this thought as I have no intention of ever designing underpants.
Step Five: Plan to Do Your Small Action. Whether you prefer to write a to-do list, set reminders on your computer, or ask Alexa or Google to remind you; find a way to set a reminder for yourself to do the task tomorrow at a specific time. This will allow your brain to stop worrying about forgetting about that task.
Planned worrying is a powerful intervention from sleep therapy that can help worry-prone minds get some much-needed shut-eye. It will take practice and consistency, but eventually, you will finally be able to quiet all of those thoughts and worries that are keeping you up at night.
Originally published at https://www.quadrawellness.com on July 11, 2021.
