r2i forum

http://healthfreedoms.org/2011/07/27/schedule-negative-time-worry-less/
[QUOTE]Pencil in 30 minutes a day to wallow in your anxieties, study suggests
For those concerned with shedding some of their anxieties, it seems planning a certain time every day to worry may help stop the stress-out cycle.

When people with adjustment disorders, burnout or severe work problems used techniques to confine their worrying a single, scheduled 30- minute period each day, they were better able to cope with their problems, a new study by researchers in the Netherlands finds.

The study made use of a technique, called “stimulus control,” that researchers have studied for almost 30 years. By compartmentalizing worry — setting aside a specific half-hour period each day to think about worries and consider solutions, and also deliberately avoiding thinking about those issues the rest of the day — people can ultimately help reduce those worries, research has shown.

“When we’re engaged in worry, it doesn’t really help us for someone to tell us to stop worrying,” said Tom Borkovec, a professor emeritus of psychology at Penn State University. “If you tell someone to postpone it for a while, we are able to actually do that.”

At work we had called it," get closure, and move on". Probably comes easy to direct-customer-contact (sales, service etc.) people. There are always new issues and worries around the corner. In life there are some big sorrows/worries that can (and meant to) stay with you. Remembrance times (scheduled once a year or once a month etc..) are the ways to manage that. R2I, LIA, Children-growing-up, Spouse-behaving-strangely etc.. are all issues one can schedule and see how it goes.

Anyone tried this ? Scheduling worry times ?

I believe, there's no need to schedule a 'worry' slot on the calendar. Worry is one thing which always follows you, no matter what you are doing. The only ways to get away from them are:-

1) Address them head on.
2) Postpone them to a later time/date, by intoxicating, diverting attention or sleeping.

Scheduling on a calendar is king of a subset of way 2. More importantly, that is just a temporary fix. A human brain can think of 1000s of things each day. If the worry(s) is big enough, half of those 1000s would be specific targeted worry that is of importance for that period. Like if there's a plumbing problem causing major leaks, no matter how you focus on other topics, you will keep getting that topic seep into your brain, till it is resolved.

So the real permanent solution would be to act on the worry. There are again two ways to act. When a worry comes, then and there itself it has to be categorized. Small or big. If small, then you tell yourself that you will act on it later. It's as good as your scheduling part, but more like conscious procrastination in most cases. You will know, you won't do anything, but will still tell your mind that you will 'act' on it sometime in the future. Fix a date/time and put it on your calendar or to-do list.
If categorized as a big worry, then seriously schedule a time to work on it. Not everything can be acted upon immediately, but once a worry is put on the calendar in the form of an action (not worry), then automatically half the work is done.

That's how I deal with worries. Either I procrastinate consciously or act on them by scheduling a time/resource for the same. For the ones on procrastinate list, sometimes they would resurrect to become 'big' worries, in which case, they get into schedule as action.