Areas › Worry and anxiety › Breaking the worry loop
When two options are both decent, there is no right answer waiting to be found. The work is not in picking. It is in doing well by whichever one you pick.
Bright, anxious people stall for exactly this reason: the options really are close, so no amount of further thinking separates them. Set a time to decide, decide, and then put your effort into making it work. If you catch yourself relitigating it that evening, that is the loop asking for another go, not new information arriving.
Qur’an and Sunnah
God is enough for those who put their trust in Him (Quran 65:3). Trust is what closes a sum you could otherwise keep doing forever.
وَيَرۡزُقۡهُ مِنۡ حَيۡثُ لَا يَحۡتَسِبُۚ وَمَن يَتَوَكَّلۡ عَلَى ٱللَّهِ فَهُوَ حَسۡبُهُۥٓۚ إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ بَٰلِغُ أَمۡرِهِۦۚ قَدۡ جَعَلَ ٱللَّهُ لِكُلِّ شَيۡءࣲ قَدۡرࣰ ا
and will provide for them from an unexpected source; God will be enough for those who put their trust in Him. God achieves His purpose; God has set a due measure for everything
Qur’an 65:3read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
In a laboratory experiment, people who spent twenty minutes analysing an upsetting memory ended up in a worse emotional state than those who reframed it or were distracted from it. More deliberation is not a neutral act. The study used anger memories in a controlled setting, so it does not tell you how long is too long for a real decision, only that longer is not automatically better.
Denson TF, Moulds ML, Grisham JR. (2012). The effects of analytical rumination, reappraisal, and distraction on anger experience.. Behavior therapy doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Moving the standard from choosing correctly to following through gives the deliberation somewhere to end.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
Ask one question about the worry: is there something to be done here that has not been done? If yes, make the plan. If the plan already exists, or there is nothing to plan, the worry gets no more of your time.
A hammering heart during anxiety is the body doing what it does when it is braced, not a sign that it is being damaged. For a lot of people that single piece of information is the thing that finally lets the panic drop.
Whatever approach the anxious person is learning, teach it to the people they live with. A skill that only one person in the house knows gets overridden by everyone else's habits.