Areas › Worry and anxiety › Breaking the worry loop
You will not talk a driven person out of worrying, so give the worry a better job. If someone frets about their revision, have them fret about whether they are also taking breaks and sleeping, since those are part of the revision.
This works because it uses the drive rather than fighting it. The same conscientiousness that produces the twelfth hour at the desk will produce a proper night's sleep once sleep counts as part of doing the work well. Make it concrete: hours at the desk, a real break away from the material, a fixed bedtime, all three on the same list.
Qur’an and Sunnah
so celebrate the name of your Lord (Quran 73:8). Attention is given somewhere else to be, which is the same move in a better direction.
وَٱذۡكُرِ ٱسۡمَ رَبِّكَ وَتَبَتَّلۡ إِلَيۡهِ تَبۡتِيلࣰ ا
so celebrate the name of your Lord and devote yourself wholeheart-edly to Him
Qur’an 73:8read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A controlled experiment found that a brief attention training exercise improved young children's ability to wait for a better reward, which shows that where attention is pointed can itself be trained. Attention is more moveable than it feels from inside. That was a study of children and a laboratory task, so it backs the idea of retargeting rather than this specific application to studying.
Murray J, Theakston A, Wells A. (2016). Can the attention training technique turn one marshmallow into two? Improving children's ability to delay gratification.. Behaviour research and therapy doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A drive that cannot be switched off can still be pointed at something better.
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
Say the coping sentence aloud instead of thinking it. Some people generate very little of that inner commentary on their own, and hearing it in the room does the job the inner voice was supposed to do.
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.
Asking again and again whether it will be alright, and being told yes, buys a few seconds of calm and guarantees the next round of asking. The kindness in the answer is what keeps it going.