Worry Time and postponing can work together as a great team of skills during your day. If you have a designated Worry Time set up already, then when you begin to dwell on your worries at the office, you'll know what to say. "At 5:15 I'm already scheduled to worry about this. I'm going to postpone this worry until 5:15. That's the perfect time to pay attention to these thoughts."

After you have been using Worry Time for a few days, then you may also have trouble filling that ten minutes with worries about that issue. So when your worries spring up unannounced at other times of the day, you might even end up saying, "Hey, I need this worry to fill my time at 5:15. I'm saving this thought!" By investing time twice a day to worry formally, you end up reducing the amount of time you worry during the rest of the day. And those worries begin to get so "old" that they just don't have the punch to them anymore. It will be much easier then to say, "No, I don't really want to think about that anymore. I'd rather [read my book, talk with friends, enjoy my day, get my work done]."

Self-Help Practice 5: Create a Loop Tape of Brief Obsessions

If your obsessive thoughts take the form of a word, a group of words, a sentence, or block of sentences that is repeated again and again, you might benefit from the use of a loop tape.

Loop tapes vary in length from ten seconds to three minutes and are often used to record outgoing messages on a telephone answering machine. When the tape if left running, it will play the same message continuously.

To practice this technique, write down the sentence or narrative exactly as it comes spontaneously into your mind. Then record it on an appropriate length of loop tape. Listen to the tape for forty-five minutes or longer each day. While listening to the tape, try to become as anxious and distressed as possible. Just as with Daily Worry Time, becoming distressed is one of the most important components of this technique. Use the tape daily until the content of the message no longer distresses you. Even if your discomfort decreases within a few days, continue the practice for at least a week.

This tape practice works on the principle called habituation. This simply means that when you confront your fears and your discomfort simultaneously and continually, you will become less anxious. That's why I ask you to persist in your practice every day for such a long period, and, while you're listening, to become as distressed as possible.

Self-Help Practice 6: Create a Tape of Extended Obsessions

So, Worry Time is the first structured practice and the loop tape is the second structured practice for worries. Here's the third.

If your worries come in the form as an extended story, with details of all the catastrophic outcomes, you can also practice using a tape recording of your detailed obsessions. This time, however, the recording will be longer, describing all of your fears.

Here's how to do it. Write out a detailed story of the feared event in the following way: Imagine you're in the middle of a spontaneous obsession. Just put yourself in that place. Write a moment-by-moment description of the exact words and pictures that come into your mind. And right it in the present tense. "I'm now standing in front of my house and I can see that the door is open." Like that. Give as many details as possible about the setting, your actions, the response of others, and especially what you're feeling. Because that's what we're going to go toward, your emotional response to the story.

Now, read your story several times, rehearse it, and then record your story on an audio tape with as much drama as you can. Put the emotion in your words because you've got to listen to it repeatedly, and each time you listen you are going to try to become as distressed as possible. So you want the drama of the event to come through in your voice.

Each day listen repeatedly to this tape for forty-five minutes. As you listen to the tape, imagine that the story is actually happening, and let yourself experience the distress inside you that the story evokes. The more you are in touch with your feelings while you listen, the more benefits you will gain from your practice.

Continue daily practice, focusing on one specific worry or obsession, until you no longer feel highly distressed. If you follow these directions in your practice, you should notice that your distress is gradually lowering within five to seven days.

Then make new tapes about other worries or obsessions that bother you, and follow the same process again. As with the loop tape, your progress will be slower if you allow your mind to wander while you listen.

If you are not noticing improvement, make sure you are doing all you can to respond to the recorded story as intensely as you would to an actual obsession.

Let me give you a sample form our book Stop Obsessing! of what such a script might sound like. Here's a woman who is a washer and feels contaminated by her mother.