Worry Postponement: What the Research Shows

Worry postponement, often called worry time, asks you to notice a worry, note it briefly and save it for a set period later in the day. It appears in NHS and other health-service self-help material, and researchers have studied it since the early 1980s. This page summarises what those studies found and where the evidence runs out.

It is general information. It does not describe a treatment, and nothing here suggests that Let It Out treats anxiety.

Prepared by Let It Out Editorial TeamUpdated 2026-11-01

Where the technique comes from

Borkovec and colleagues proposed in 1983 that because worry is an internal event that can happen almost anywhere, it becomes linked to many everyday cues. Their suggestion, which they called stimulus control, was to restrict worrying to a set time and place so that fewer situations would trigger it.

Current self-help versions follow the same pattern. The Centre for Clinical Interventions' sheet, for example, suggests the same time, place and length each day (its example is 6pm for 20 minutes), noting worries in a couple of words as they arise, turning back to the present, and returning to them in the worry period. A newer variant uses a metacognitive rationale, presenting postponement as a way to test the belief that worry is uncontrollable.

What the studies found

The 1983 study compared a four-week trial of stimulus control instructions with no treatment in people who described themselves as worriers, and reported a significant drop in daily worry. Its abstract does not give sample sizes, and we could not access the full text.

McGowan and Behar (2013) randomly assigned 53 people with high trait worry to two weeks of either a daily 30-minute worry period in a set place or a comparison condition that encouraged them not to avoid worry. The stimulus control group improved more on worry, anxiety, negative mood and insomnia, but not on depression or positive mood. The authors called the results preliminary.

The most complete summary so far is a meta-analysis by Dippel, Brosschot and Verkuil, published in 2024. It pooled 7 randomised trials with 999 participants, most of them women, of whom 250 experienced their worry as a burden. Compared with only recording worries, postponement practised for between a week and a month produced small effects on worry duration (d = 0.313) and frequency (d = 0.189). In plain terms, people tended to worry somewhat less often and for somewhat less time, not dramatically less. Effects were larger in studies that included more women.

Mixed results, and evidence in clinical samples

Not every trial has worked. In an online study by Versluis and colleagues (2016), 996 people were asked to record their worrying for six days and 361 completed it. Those told to postpone worry to a 30-minute evening period did no better on worry or health complaints than those who only recorded worries, and participants reported difficulty postponing. A 2019 study of 114 students with high health worry also found no effect on worry.

A 2025 online trial by McCarrick and colleagues followed 186 people for 14 days. Adding specific if-then plans for when and how to postpone reduced daily worry duration by roughly 15 minutes compared with standard postponement, but neither version improved sleep compared with the control groups.

Evidence in people with a diagnosed anxiety disorder is thinner. A 2024 randomised waitlist-controlled trial by Krzikalla and colleagues included 47 people with generalised anxiety disorder and 35 with hypochondriasis. After two face-to-face sessions and six days of postponing worry to a set daily time, worry was significantly lower in the generalised anxiety group than on the waitlist, and the gains held at a four-week follow-up, which was assessed only in the treated group. There was no significant difference for hypochondriasis. The authors call for larger trials with an active comparison group, and note that earlier preliminary research in generalised anxiety disorder had not supported the stimulus-control version.

What the evidence doesn't show

Taken together, the studies support worry postponement as a modest, low-effort technique. They leave several gaps:

Long-term effects. The meta-analysis notes that long-term follow-up studies are still lacking; most trials ran for days or weeks.
Broad samples. Many participants were students or self-selected volunteers, several of the trials were run in the Netherlands, and most participants were women.
Stand-alone treatment. The technique often forms part of cognitive behavioural treatments for worry, and McGowan and Behar suggest it belongs in larger treatment packages.
Format. The 2016 trial concluded that a paper-and-pencil version cannot simply be moved online and expected to work the same way.
Sleep. Results are mixed: McGowan and Behar reported less insomnia, while the 2025 trial, which recorded sleep every morning for two weeks, found no improvement.

How Let It Out's revisit timer relates

Let It Out lets you capture a worry by text or voice, keep it in a worry box and set a revisit timer for when you want to come back to it. That mirrors one part of the technique: noting a worry and choosing a later time to return to it.

It is not the same as the protocols above. Most studies used one fixed daily period, often 30 minutes, at a set time and place, whereas a revisit timer is set for an individual worry at a time you choose. No study we know of has tested Let It Out, so we make no claim that using it produces the effects reported here. The app also cannot decide whether a particular concern is safe to postpone.

If you want to stay close to the studied version, choose the same revisit time each day, go back to your list in the same place and keep the session bounded. Our worry-time guide and free timer can help with that.