The worry list

How it works

Ten minutes, early evening, pen and paper. Write every worry you can find, in a plain list, one line each. Big and small, the mortgage and the dentist. Do not sort them yet. Do not solve them. Just get them out of your head and onto the page where you can see them.

Then go down the list and put one of two marks beside each. A tick for anything you can do something about, and next to it the one next step, as small as possible: "call the surgery" or "ask Sam". A dash for anything you cannot do anything about tonight, or ever. Those stay on the list too. The point is not to clear them. It is to know that they are written down and will still be there tomorrow, so you do not have to hold them overnight.

Close the notebook. That is the practice.

Why it helps at night

Half the worries that wake you at two are worries about forgetting. Did I book that. Did I tell her. The list answers those before they are asked. The other half are worries you cannot fix at two in the morning no matter how long you lie there, and the list tells you, honestly, that they are on the page and that two in the morning is not when they get solved.

If a new one arrives in the night, the notebook by the bed takes it. One line, no light, back down.

Keep it boring

The list is not a journal and does not need to be well written. Nobody reads it. Scraps of paper are fine, though a cheap notebook is better because you can see last week's list and notice how many of those worries did not happen.

Do it at roughly the same time each day, early evening rather than at bedtime. Bed is for sleeping, not for processing. If you are following the sleep course here, you will meet this practice again in the fifth lesson, with more on timing.

When the list is all dashes

Some weeks, especially when someone you love is ill, almost everything on the list is outside your control. That is not a failure of the method. It is information. A list of dashes says: this is a week for rest and company and a walk, not for fixing. Turn to those pages.