A few nights ago, I showed up at my boyfriend’s house with a lot on my mind. I wanted to introduce him to The Worry Minute, my technique for trying to clear my head of all the little things I was obsessing about.

When I call upon The Worry Minute, I tell myself, “Ok — you want to worry, Ziesenis? Fine. Worry about everything. Spew it out. But you have just one minute.”

D.J. patiently sat and heard me explain how The Worry Minute was going to work, and I started practicing the breathless monologue that I was about to deliver. But then he said, “So, what comes to mind first?”

Instead of me spewing a thousand worries in a minute, we talked about the first worry that came to mind. Turns out that worry was THE worry — it was The Worry Component that caused everything else to seem overwhelming as well. The Worry Component was the reason I was freaking out, not necessarily the other 999 things.

We talked in depth about The Worry Component, and he said, “What else do you have?” I didn’t have anything else. I was done. Instead of simply listing a thousand worries, we had taken the core problem and solved it, and nothing else really mattered.

This happens to me constantly as a professional copywriter. Over Christmas, I took a notepad and wrote “What I need to do for [client name]” at the top of seven sheets of paper. Some of the tasks were monumental — giant projects that needed great blocks of time. Other tasks would take me less than a half an hour. But because I was concerned about the giant projects, I had a tough time even approaching the notebook. The bulk of the challenges seemed too big to handle in any time period I had free. And I generalized that everything in the notebook was too big to handle.

But if I apply the new theory of tackling The Worry Component rather than using The Worry Minute, I can more easily dissect the true challenges from the little tasks that don’t really hurt. Sounds better than incessant fretting, doesn’t it?