Areas › Worry and anxiety › Breaking the worry loop
Most decisions are not sealed. Choose, run with it for a set time, then look again and change course if it is clearly wrong. Knowing there is a review date takes a great deal of weight off the choice.
The weight comes from treating the decision as permanent, which almost none of them are. Put an actual date in the diary for the review. That gives the worry somewhere to be filed until then, and it is much easier to say not now, we look at this in March, than to say stop thinking about it.
Qur’an and Sunnah
whenever you forget, remember your Lord and say, May my Lord guide me closer to what is right (Quran 18:24). Correction along the way is written into the instruction.
إِلَّآ أَن يَشَآءَ ٱللَّهُۚ وَٱذۡكُر رَّبَّكَ إِذَا نَسِيتَ وَقُلۡ عَسَىٰٓ أَن يَهۡدِيَنِ رَبِّي لِأَقۡرَبَ مِنۡ هَٰذَا رَشَدࣰ ا
without adding, ‘God willing,’ and, whenever you forget, remember your Lord and say, ‘May my Lord guide me closer to what is right.’
Qur’an 18:24read 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, going over a stressful encounter again and again produced cardiovascular activation that built up across repetitions, while a visual task interrupted the imagery holding it in place. Each fresh run through costs something rather than getting you closer to an answer. It was a short laboratory study, so it shows the cost of repetition, not how best to schedule real decisions.
McClelland AB, Jones KV, Douglas Gregg ME. (2009). Psychological and cumulative cardiovascular effects of repeated angry rumination and visuospatial suppression.. International journal of psychophysiology : official journal of the International Organization of Psychophysiology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A choice you can revise later is not worth the same amount of rehearsal now.
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.
Sometimes there really is evidence for the fear. Say so. The balance comes from the other column being fuller, not from pretending the first column is empty.
Some people never ask for help because they assume everyone's head is like theirs. If yours has been running like this since you were small, it does not feel like a condition. It feels like being you.