James Laughlin recommends scheduling 15 to 20 minutes each evening to worry. Block it on your calendar, list your concerns during that time, then postpone any worry that pops up by reminding yourself you'll handle it later. After a week, your brain learns to trust the schedule and intrusive thoughts drop off.
Setting aside 15 to 20 minutes a day to worry actually helps. You have to put it in your calendar in order for it to work. And there's research studies on this. So if I said, all right, 7 to 7:15 every evening, I'm gonna sit down at my kitchen table and I'm gonna worry. I can worry about everything, what I'm gonna do tomorrow or what's happening in the world next week. But you sit down and you worry as much as you can for 15 minutes. And then whenever you worry outside of that time, you just remind yourself, it's not time to worry about that yet. I'll worry about that later. And the first few days that you do this, you're going to think, oh, I constantly have to tell myself I'm going to worry about this later. And it's kind of annoying. But if you stick with it, after about a week, your brain finally starts to trust you. Like, I don't have to ping you all day long to remind you to worry about that thing because I know you're going to let me worry about it later.
