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# A Practice Worth Trying: The Worry Window
- URL: https://gliszen.ghost.io/a-practice-worth-trying-the-worry/
- Published: 2025-11-08T11:03:23.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-08T11:03:23.000Z
- Author: RP Goldenberg | SwiftMindCare
- Tags: Newsletter, Substack-Moved, #Migrated-1784927624346, #Import 2026-07-24 21:18

**This is a simple tool that works with your nervous system, not against it.**

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**How it works:**

Set aside 15 minutes at a consistent time each day (ideally not right before bed, but early enough in the evening). Grab a notebook or open a document. Write down everything that's weighing on you: worries, unfinished tasks, things that stressed you out, fears that keep circling back.

When the 15 minutes are up, close the notebook. The worries stay there until your next session.

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**Why this helps:**

When anxious thoughts pop up randomly throughout the day or night, your amygdala treats them like urgent threats. Your body responds accordingly: racing heart, tension, that wired-but-tired feeling that makes rest impossible.

By giving worry a specific time and place, you're engaging your prefrontal cortex instead. You're telling your brain: "Yes, this matters. We'll pay attention to it. Just not right this second."

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**What changes over time:**

With consistent practice, your brain builds new patterns. You're training your nervous system to recognize that most worries aren't emergencies requiring immediate action. That gap between noticing a worry and reacting to it gets easier to maintain.

When you return to your worry list the next day, something interesting often happens. Many of those concerns have lost their grip. Some have resolved on their own. Others feel more manageable now that they're not demanding urgent attention at 2am.

This practice validates that your concerns are real while teaching your brain that not everything needs solving right now. That's a skill your nervous system can carry forward.

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**The science:**

This approach aligns with the principle of temporal distancing in emotion regulation. Research shows that creating structured time gaps between emotional experiences and our responses to them allows the prefrontal cortex to modulate amygdala activity, reducing the intensity of anxiety responses and improving our ability to process concerns more rationally.