Worry is a waste of time and achieves nothing. We know this - but we do it anyway! It’s not always possible to dismiss worrying thoughts from our minds although it’s easy for others to say what a waste of time it all is.

However, we can use our innate sense of creativity to make worrying work for us – that is, if we’re going to worry anyway, we might as well do it creatively.

Having a time in the day when we’re ‘allowed’ to worry makes it that much easier to ignore the worries for the rest of the day, thus freeing us up for what we really want to do. And when our official worry-time comes around we can really throw ourselves into it - enjoy it, even.

Decide on a time, say 8pm. Decide how much time you’re going to give to your worrying, say quarter of an hour. You’ll find out what suits you best. At 8pm make yourself comfortable and start worrying. Give it everything you’ve got! Let’s not do this by halves. Worry, worry, worry. Fifteen minutes later, stop. That’s it until 8pm tomorrow. Lovely - now you have virtually a whole worry-free day in which to get on with your life, and you can even look forward to your next worry session, safe in the knowledge that it’s had boundaries put upon it and it can’t get out of hand.

If a worry happens to rise up in your consciousness outside of its rightful time, just make a note of it, thereby getting it out of your mind onto the paper, and then also you’ll remember to worry about it at 8pm.

By the time 8pm comes around, some of these worries will have become less worrisome and you’ll be wondering why you bothered to make a note of them at all. Some of them your unconscious mind will have solved while you weren’t worrying about them, and some of them still need to have some concentration spent on them in your worry time.

The last lot then, see if you can make them into specific questions that you need to ask – only then can you start to solve them – otherwise they remain just a vague, nagging worry - you need to have them cornered and clear in your mind to fix them.

By the time you’ve done this a few times you’ll wonder what on earth you used to worry about. You might even have to think of something to worry about in order to get your 15 minutes creative contemplation at 8pm. Go for it!