Worry Time

I'm a huge worrier. I fret. I hem and haw. I bite my nails. And for the past year or so, I seem to wake up at 3 am and find it impossible to go back to sleep again. Sometimes I'll lie awake for several hours imagining worst case scenarios, or just general nondescript horrific scenarios before finally nodding off again. By that time, I can sleep just long enough for my alarm to be really painful when it goes off a short while later. Ugh.

So in the book I just finished, Leap Year, by Helen Russell (the same author as The Year of Living Danishly, which I also loved) she suffers from the very same woes and decides to try a little thing called Worry Time. It's wonderfully simple, you just set aside 30 minutes at the same time each day, preferably before a transition in your day, and write down everything you're worried about. You don't have to go into the reasons or search for solutions, just get it all out on paper, by hand. Then do it again the next day. Russell chose to worry right before leaving to pick her son up from daycare, and for me, a good time to worry is right before lunch.

It's amazing, because I have enough worries - real and imagined - to fill hours and hours of nighttime. But in broad daylight, worrying for 30 minutes is actually an incredibly long time and feels like a chore! The first day, I only managed to worry for 20 minutes. The next day the same. The third day, I was feeling quite frantic and made it the whole 30 minutes, but the day after that, just 15. After that, I was less worried and stopped keeping track.

Somehow the act of writing worries down immediately lessens their severity. And it also felt to me as if having my worries written down, they were safely kept and therefore I didn't need to exert as much effort holding onto them and carrying them about the rest of the time. Side note: Montessori was very keen on the brain-hand connection. She called the hand the prehensile organ of the mind, and modern-day brain scans show that a greater surface area of our brains is devoted to our hands than any other body part. It seems that writing our worries down with our hands actually does move them out of our brains, right through our fingertips onto the paper. It's like magic!

I have to say, I'm quite pleased with the results. My nails are long enough to paint and I've been sleeping through the night. This is huge! How do you keep your worries at bay? Would you try worry time?

(Photo via A Little Bit of Bliss)