Stimulus control for worry — worry time, or worry postponement — is one of the oldest techniques in the behavioural treatment of generalized anxiety, and one of the best evidenced relative to how simple it is.
How to do it
Pick a time. Fifteen to thirty minutes, the same time daily. Not within two hours of bedtime, for obvious reasons. Early evening works for most people.
Pick a place. Not your bed, not your desk. Somewhere you don’t otherwise spend much time — a particular chair, the kitchen table. The place matters more than people expect.
Postpone during the day. When a worry arrives, note it in a sentence and tell yourself you will get to it at six. Then return your attention to what you were doing. Do not argue with the worry, do not resolve it, don’t reassure yourself. Just defer it.
Then actually worry. This is the part people skip and it’s essential. At six, sit down and worry deliberately, for the full period, about everything on the list. If you finish early, keep worrying until the time is up.
Why it works
Three mechanisms, and none of them is the one people assume.
It breaks the stimulus pairing. Worry has become associated with everywhere — your desk, your car, your pillow. Confining it to one chair at one time weakens those associations, which is why the same chair each day matters.
It demonstrates controllability. The core belief in GAD is that worry is uncontrollable. Successfully postponing it, even once, is direct evidence against that — which is more powerful than any argument about whether worry is useful.
Deliberate worry is oddly hard to sustain. Most people find that by six o’clock, several items no longer feel urgent, and that worrying on purpose for twenty minutes is boring rather than compelling. That deflation is informative.
What people get wrong
Using it as suppression. Postponing isn’t pushing away. You aren’t trying to not have the thought; you’re declining to engage with it now, and you’ve a specific time when you will.
Skipping the appointment. Then it becomes avoidance, and it stops working within days.
Expecting it immediately. Give it two weeks of daily practice. The first few days are mostly failure, and that’s the normal shape of it.
Where it fits
It’s a component, not a treatment. It works best alongside the actual work on uncertainty tolerance, and it won’t touch OCD rumination, where scheduling a period of deliberate mental review is essentially scheduling a compulsion.