Quick Win: How to spend less time worrying

Worrying can take up so much of our time, especially when most of what we worry about never actually happens.

This worrying uses up time that could be better spent on the things that truly count, but how can we reduce this and actually free up that time?

Oliver Burkeman is a New York Times bestselling author of books such as ‘Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals’ and ‘Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts’. Oliver is also a regular columnist for The Guardian.

Oliver shares:

• 🧬 The evolutionary reason we worry and why it doesn’t serve us effectively in a modern world
• 🤔 Why understanding why we worry is the first step to minimising the amount of time it takes up
• 🛠️ Some key strategies we can all use to reduce our time spent worrying

Listen to the full interview with Oliver here: https://amantha.com/podcasts/want-to-make-time-for-the-things-that-count/

Connect with Oliver via his website, or get his latest book, Meditations for Mortals, here

 

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Credits:

Host: Amantha Imber

Sound Engineer: The Podcast Butler

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Worrying can take up so much of our time, especially
when most of what we worry about actually never happens.
This worrying uses up time that could be better spent
on the things that truly count. But how can we
reduce this and actually free up that time. Oliver Berkman
is a New York Times bestselling author of books such

(00:21):
as four Thousand Weeks, Time Management for Mortals and Meditation
for Mortals Four Weeks to Embrace your limitations and make
time for what counts. Oliver is also a regular columnist
for The Guardian and if there's anyone who truly understands
the psychology of time management and happiness, it's Oliver. In
our chat, Oliver reveals how understanding why we worry is

(00:43):
the first step to minimizing the amount of time it
takes up, as well as some key strategies for keeping
our worrying under control. Welcome to How I Work, a
show about habits, ritual's and strategies for optimizing your day.
I'm your host, doctor Amantha Imber. On today's quick Win episode,

(01:10):
we go back to an episode from the past and
I pick out a quick win that you can apply today.
So Oliver has a concept he talks about in his books,
and he says that most of the bridges that we
worry about never end up being crossed. So I wanted
to know exactly what that means and how he applies
that mindset in the day to day.

Speaker 2 (01:35):
Worry is kind of fascinating, and I think one way
of understanding worry is that it's the sort of attempt
by a human being who is inherently limited to the
present moment. One of the many ways in which were
limited is we're sort of temporarily localized. We wish we
could sort of also be in the future, checking up
on it, making sure that everything's going to be fine,

(01:55):
but we can't. And so worry is this sort of
mental dis comfort that arises from trying to repeatedly sort
of get out there and secure a place in time
that we're not actually in and never are in. And
you know, if I wanted to get sort of evolutionary
psychology about it, which I don't usually want to do

(02:15):
very much, but you know, you could see how perhaps
we sort of evolved in an environment where where having
that concern and then dealing with it was something that
happened in a very short order right, like you hear
a sound, you're worried about it, you check it out,
you realize it's no threat to your safety. Now we
live in this world that's been called a you know,
delayed return environment, where the thing you're worrying about could

(02:36):
well be whether how an editor will respond to a
pitch you've made sometime in the next four weeks, or
whether an attempt to purchase a house will go through
at some point in the next two months. You know,
all these kinds of slow things where the worry just
has nowhere to go. It doesn't motivate a quick action
to get to deal with the worry. It just sort
of curdle. And I think the thing about crossing bridges is, yeah,

(02:57):
there's another way of making the same point. Really, we're
trying to sort of think through all the things that
could go wrong, think our way through what we do,
and reassure ourselves that that will have gone okay if
that happens. You can't ever be certain that something goes
okay until it's gone okay. So trying to cross bridges
before you get to them, in that sense, is just

(03:18):
a recipe for that kind of unpleasant, anxious state of constantly,
repetitively trying to do it and failing. There are all
sorts of ideas in cognitive therapy and elsewhere about you know,
scheduling a time of day in which to worry and
things like this, and I think it does help some
people to do something like that. The version of that
that I find helpful is to market date in my

(03:40):
calendar maybe three four weeks in the future, to sort
of remind myself to focus again on that topic. And
I find that knowing that that's there and it's coming
up in the calendar is incredibly powerful in terms of
enabling me to let go of it in the present.
If it's still a big issue four weeks from now,
then I will kick into worrying about it again. I

(04:00):
sort of on some level, I'm concerned that if I
were to stop worrying about it, I might completely forget
about it, right, And it's wild, right as parents, if
you're worried about some issue with your child's welfare, like,
I'm not going to forget about that, it's ridiculous. But
some part of me doesn't trust myself, and it's like
if I let go and just got into the thing
I was working on, today, maybe like ten years later,

(04:23):
I'd be like, oh, no, everything's gone terribly wrong in
life because I completely failed to attend to this thing.
So putting that kind of three or four weeks ahead
thing in I find really effective because then I can
be like, Okay, just in case I completely forget about
this important thing, it will come back into my world.

Speaker 1 (04:41):
I love that I've experimented myself with having a worry
least and then setting a daily worry time and confining
my worrying to that time of day, and I found
that quite effective. But what I like about what you've
just suggested is that it's almost like a test of
a hypothesis. And the more and more you're like, if
everything you worry about you actually just put in the

(05:04):
diary to spend some time thinking about a couple of
weeks from today, and then every time you get to
those things, like nine times out of ten, you're going
to think, what was I even worrying about that never
eventuated into anything, which I feel then feeds, you know,
the like a more sensible hypothesis and theory that actually

(05:24):
I worry about things that I don't even need to
be spending time worrying about so I really I enjoy that.

Speaker 2 (05:30):
Yes, and even in the one time out of ten,
right then it comes around and you're like, okay, what
are some the chances are you'll be in a better
place to just sort of figure out some actions that
you could take relative to it.

Speaker 1 (05:41):
I hope you enjoyed this little quick win with Oliver.
If you'd like to listen to the full interview, you
can find a link to that in the show notes.
If you like today's show, make sure you get follow
on your podcast app to be alerted when new episodes drop.
How I Work was recorded on the traditional land of
the warringery, People, Out of the Cool and Nake