Worries you have no control over: an exercise that helps you set them down

There are only so many seats in your head, and yet every evening a full auditorium turns up: your parents’ health, your job, your child’s grade, the price of everything, a world that feels less and less predictable. Worries keep no timetable — they come into the shower, onto the walk, into bed. And the most maddening part: most of them circle around things you cannot influence in the slightest right now.

Worry looks like work. It gives you the feeling that all this chewing over is solving something, that you are prepared, that you have things under control. In reality most worry behaves like a rocking chair: it gives you something to do, but it takes you nowhere. The difference between worrying and problem-solving is one of the most useful distinctions you can learn — and this piece is about exactly that.

I’ll show you a simple exercise with two circles that sorts worries into the ones worth doing something about and the ones you need to learn to set down. I’ll add the “worry time” technique, which has had research behind it since the 1980s. None of it demands iron willpower — just paper, a pencil and a few days of practice.

Worry isn’t problem-solving — it only pretends to be

The psychologist Thomas Borkovec, one of the most important researchers of worry, showed something surprising together with his colleagues: worry is largely a verbal activity. When we worry, we run sentences through our heads (“what if…”, “I should have…”), not vivid images. And that is its secret function: verbal chewing keeps us one step away from the actual feeling. For Borkovec, worry is a form of avoidance — instead of really feeling the fear and working it through, we nibble at it in small, bearable doses. Relief in the short term, but in the long term the fear stays fresh, because it never truly comes out into the open.

Problem-solving is something else entirely. It has a beginning and an end: you define the problem, weigh up the options, choose a step, take it. Worry has no last page — you can chew over the same question for ten years. A simple test I suggest to people: if after twenty minutes of thinking about something you are not a millimetre closer to a decision or an action, you are not solving a problem. You are worrying.

And here is a finding I’m especially fond of: the researchers LaFreniere and Newman (2020) asked participants to write down their worries for ten days, then checked which of them had come true. The result: roughly 91 per cent of the worries did not come true — and even among those that did, most turned out better than expected. Our internal weather forecast is systematically too gloomy, in other words. If your thoughts tend to spin in an endless loop more generally, you’ll recognise yourself in my piece on overthinking — here, though, let’s stay with worry and what to do with it.

Why we hold on to worry so stubbornly

If worry is so useless, why don’t we simply drop it ourselves? Because we hold positive beliefs about it — usually unspoken ones. In my work I hear them in countless versions: “If I worry, I won’t be caught off guard.” “Worrying means I care.” “If I stop worrying, something is bound to happen.” Worry takes on the role of a talisman: because we worry and the bad thing mostly doesn’t happen, the brain concludes that the worrying protected us. In truth the bad thing didn’t happen because most bad things simply don’t — but the superstition is confirmed and the habit reinforced.

The second trap is the sense of preparation. It seems to us that rehearsing the worst-case scenarios toughens us up, that we’ll be ready when the blow lands. Experience and research show the opposite: chronic worry does not prepare us for hard events, but it reliably exhausts us before them. The body doesn’t distinguish well between an imagined and a real threat — every scenario in your head is paid for with a dose of stress activation. Someone who spends years preparing for disasters that never happen arrives at the real test already tired.

I’m not writing this to disparage worry — I’m writing it because you can’t let go of a habit while you still believe it’s protecting you. So the first step is an honest look at it: what does my worry promise me, and does it actually keep that promise?

Two circles: what is yours and what isn’t

The idea is older than psychology. Almost two thousand years ago the Stoic philosopher Epictetus opened his handbook for living with the line that some things are within our power and others are not — and that most human unhappiness is born of confusing the two. Stephen Covey gave it a modern form with the notions of the circle of concern and the circle of influence.

The circle of concern takes in everything that weighs on you: the health of those close to you, the economy, the weather on your wedding day, other people’s opinions, the past, the future. The circle of influence is the smaller circle inside it: what you can actually affect through your own conduct — your actions, your words, your decisions, where you place your attention, who you ask for help, when you go to bed.

Covey’s key observation: people who invest their energy in the circle of influence slowly widen that circle — through their actions they change even things that once looked out of reach. People who pour energy into the circle of concern experience the opposite: because they chew over things they cannot move, a sense of helplessness grows and the circle of influence shrinks. Psychology would add that attention trapped in the unchangeable is an excellent breeding ground for anxiety and rumination, which according to Susan Nolen-Hoeksema’s research sustains and deepens both anxiety and depression.

It matters, though, that you don’t read the two circles as an order to “stop worrying” — you can’t order that of yourself, any more than you can order yourself to sleep. The circles are a tool for directing actions, not feelings. Worry is allowed to exist; the only question is where you’ll put your energy.

The exercise: worries on paper and in the right circle

Now to the practice. Take a sheet of paper and draw a large circle, and a smaller one inside it. Then do this:

• Empty your head. For ten minutes write down everything you’re currently worried about — no censoring, no particular order. A worry that takes shape on paper loses part of its power; in your head it’s fog, on paper it’s a list.
• Sort them. For each worry ask yourself: “Can I, through my own conduct, affect this — at least in part?” If yes, write it in the inner circle. If no, in the outer one. Be honest: “I can chew it over” is not influence.
• Split the mixed worries. Most big worries are composite. “I’m worried about my mother’s health” breaks down into a part you have no influence over (the diagnosis, the course of the illness) and a part you do (I ring her, I go with her to the doctor, I arrange help at home). Write each part into its own circle.
• Give the inner circle a step. For each worry in the circle of influence write one concrete, small, doable step and when you’ll take it. Not “sort out my finances”, but “ring the bank on Wednesday at nine”.
• Give the outer circle a sentence. For the worries beyond your influence, prepare a short sentence to say when they come back: “This isn’t in my hands. My job is…” — and you finish it with a step from the inner circle, or with whatever you’re doing right now.

The people I work with often experience two things during this exercise. First relief: the list is shorter and more manageable than the impression in their head. Then discomfort: it turns out that the vast majority of worries belong in the outer circle. That discomfort is precious — it is, in fact, the sadness of realising that the control we wanted isn’t there. And it is exactly that honest sadness, not the chewing over, that is the path by which worry eventually really is set down.

Worry time: give worry an appointment, not open access

The second technique looks almost like a joke, but it has serious science behind it. As far back as 1983 Borkovec and colleagues published research on “stimulus control” for worry: instead of worrying anytime and anywhere, worries get their own daily appointment — thirty minutes at five in the afternoon, say, always in the same place. When a worry shows up outside that slot, you note it down briefly (“work — at five”) and return your attention to what you’re doing. At the appointed time you really do sit down and give the list your attention.

Why does this work? Because worry is a habit tied to cues. If you worry in bed, on the sofa, behind the wheel and in the shower, your whole world becomes a stage for worry — every place and every hour sets the chewing off. By restricting it to one time and one place, you unpick that web. Later research (McGowan and Behar, 2013, for example) confirmed that such training significantly reduces worry, anxiety and even insomnia. That’s precisely why “worry time” is also a standard part of cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia, which I wrote about in my piece on insomnia — the thoughts that would otherwise circle at three in the morning get a daytime timetable of their own.

A few practical details so the technique comes to life: don’t put the slot right before bed; during it you can also sort the worries by the circles from the previous exercise; and expect the postponing to go badly for the first few days. That’s normal — you’re training a muscle you’ve never used. For most people something unusual happens after one to two weeks: at worry time, half the worries they wrote down already feel out of date.

Worries you can influence: take the smallest possible step

For the worries in the inner circle there’s a simple rule: a worry you can translate into action, translate into action — and into the smallest action possible. A large part of chronic worry feeds on putting things off: the step looks too big, so we don’t take it, so the worry stays, so we feel even worse. Instead of “I have to talk to my boss”, try “by Friday I’ll write down the three sentences I want to say to him”. Instead of “I have to sort out my health”, try “tomorrow I’ll book a check-up”. Once the step is small enough that it can’t be avoided, the wheel turns the other way: instead of worry feeding the delay and the delay feeding the worry, action feeds confidence — and confidence shrinks the space in which worry can grow at all.

Action has one more advantage over chewing things over: it tells your body that you are not helpless. At its core, worry is a sense of threat with no way out; every step you take, however small, undermines that sense. That’s why we often feel disproportionately better after making the call, sending the request or writing the list — not because the problem is solved, but because we’ve stepped out of the role of onlooker and into the role of someone who acts.

Worries beyond your influence: setting down isn’t ignoring

The worries in the outer circle are harder — and this is where things most often go wrong. “Set the worry down” doesn’t mean “pretend you don’t care”. You will go on caring about your mother’s health, and rightly so; worry is often just an awkward form of love. Setting it down means three things: admitting that the outcome isn’t in your hands; allowing the feeling underneath the worry (usually fear or sadness) to exist, without chewing it over in words; and returning your attention, again and again, to the present, where your life is actually taking place.

The body helps here. Worry lives in words, so the easiest way to interrupt it is through something wordless: a walk on which you really look and listen, a lengthened out-breath, a warm bath, exercise, cooking with your full attention. It also helps to limit the food you give your worry — if the state of the world worries you, the news you check three times a day can be checked once. And talking helps: a worry said out loud to someone who listens often shrinks back to its true size. If your worries like to dress themselves up as intrusive thoughts that are hard to argue with, read my piece on anxious thoughts too — there’s more there about believing your thoughts a little less.

And one more thing I like to say out loud: knowing how to set down a worry you have no influence over is not surrender and it is not indifference. It is maturity — a quiet acknowledgement that you are a human being, not the world’s weatherman. The people you love don’t need your sleeplessness; they need your presence when the moments come in which you really can do something.

When worry grows into something more

Worry is a normal part of life and no exercise will remove it entirely — nor would that be a good thing. But when worry is there most days, is hard to stop, jumps from topic to topic and comes with tension, irritability, tiredness or insomnia lasting several months, it’s worth considering that this is no longer just a habit but an anxiety disorder — and effective professional help exists for it. Even if things haven’t gone that far, this holds: if you notice something bigger hiding underneath your worries — a fear of loss, a feeling that you have to hold everything together on your own, an old story about responsibility — we can talk about it. Write to me and let’s look at what your worries are really protecting.

I recently shared a short post about the circle of influence on Instagram too — if a visual summary suits you better, you’ll find it here:

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