A free course for worry, when the what-ifs won’t stop

The what-if takes five seconds. The worry is everything you do after it.

Updated October 15, 2026 · Built on published research on worry and rumination

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You read the message again to work out the tone. You run through what could go wrong, then what you’d do if it did. You check your phone, the news, your bank balance, and lie awake rehearsing tomorrow. Here’s the plain answer. You can’t stop what-ifs arriving. Nobody can. But the what-if lasts a few seconds, and the worry is the long chase that follows. The chase is something you do, which means it’s something you can learn to stop doing. Not by fighting the thought, and not by answering it. By leaving it where it is.

The free guideWorry postponement: how to put a worry off until laterThe worry window, step by step.

How the loop shows up

Take an ordinary one. At five o’clock your manager messages: “Can we have a quick chat tomorrow?” That’s the trigger. Five seconds.

Then the chase. What did I get wrong? You go back over a month of work. You plan what to say if it’s about the report, and if it isn’t. A friend says it’s probably nothing, and that helps for ten minutes. At midnight you’re still going. Whatever the chat is about, the evening of worrying didn’t change it. It just sent you in tired.

The psychologist Adrian Wells describes a worry episode as triggered by “an initial intrusive thought, usually in the form of a ‘What if . . . ?’ question” (2009, p. 95). Everyone gets those. Two beliefs about worry keep the chase going:

• “It helps.” If I think of everything, nothing can catch me out. Not worrying can feel like not even trying to cope (Wells, p. 95). So you start willingly.
• “I can’t stop.” Once it starts, it has to run its course. So you keep going, and start to worry about how much you worry.

Then come the fixes: checking, asking for reassurance, avoiding things, scanning for the next problem. Each feels like it helps for a moment, and each keeps the alarm on. That’s the con. Worry promises to keep you ready. But you can prepare without it, and what the worrying itself hands you is a tired evening.

What the course does about it

Eight spoken lessons with an AI guide, about 40 minutes each, at a pace you choose (about eight weeks if you take one a week). They work on the chase, never on what your worries are about. The guide won’t weigh up whether a worry is likely or tell you it’ll be fine. Asking for that over and over, from people or from an AI, soon becomes another fix.

• Lesson 1, The trap. The five-second what-if versus the long chase, and naming it when it starts: “that’s a loop.”
• Lesson 2, The brake. Testing “I can’t stop.” Leaving a worry thought alone, neither answering nor pushing it away, and telling the chase “not now, later.” An optional 15-minute worry window in the early evening, well before bed.
• Lesson 3, Watching the sky. Cloud or chase? And the loss-of-control test: worry as hard as you can about something small for two minutes, then stop, and see what actually happens.
• Lesson 4, Fixes that feed it. Checking, reassurance, scanning, avoiding: why they keep the alarm on. You drop one for a week.
• Lesson 5, The great con. “Worry keeps me prepared,” tested with a worry-more day and a worry-less day.
• Lesson 6, Old files. Shame and old memories, and the worry about worrying: the fear that these thoughts and feelings could harm or overwhelm you.
• Lesson 7, Attention is yours. The full 12-minute attention training, and steering attention outward when you catch yourself scanning.
• Lesson 8, Nothing to give up. Your plan for when worries come to visit. A visit isn’t a relapse.

Between lessons the practice is small: most days, a few minutes. For the first four weeks after Lesson 2 that’s attention training twice a day (one full 12-minute round and one short 5-minute round, as practice, not as a way to calm down mid-worry), then once a day, plus postponing loops as they start. It takes practice, not force. In a small trial, adults with generalised anxiety disorder who learned postponement this way in two sessions with a therapist worried less afterwards than people on a waiting list (Krzikalla et al., 2024). This course uses the same idea as self-help. The course itself hasn’t been tested in a trial.

Try a short sample

A taste of the course for worry: a few minutes of the guide explaining the loop, then a short guided practice. Headphones help.

What it isn’t, and when to get help

This is self-help education. It isn’t therapy, the guide is an AI, and the course doesn’t diagnose anything or treat anxiety conditions. It works on one part of the picture: the habit of chasing worries. Talk to a GP, doctor or psychologist if:

• worry has run most days for months, feels hard to control, and is wearing down your sleep, work or relationships
• you get panic attacks, or anxiety is stopping you doing ordinary things
• your mood has been low for weeks, or you’ve lost interest in things you used to enjoy
• you have new or changing physical symptoms, which deserve a proper check

For anxiety and worry that won’t ease, the talking therapy most often recommended is cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) with a trained therapist (NICE guidance). A doctor can also talk you through other options, medication included. Some services also offer metacognitive therapy, which did well against CBT in a trial with adults with long-standing, hard-to-control worry (Nordahl et al., 2018). In England you can refer yourself to NHS Talking Therapies.

If your worries come as unwanted thoughts that feel wrong, and you feel driven to check or get certain (sometimes called Pure O), that can be part of OCD, which a qualified professional can assess. The first-line treatment for OCD is CBT with exposure and response prevention (ERP) from a qualified clinician, and this course is no substitute for it. See Pure O and intrusive thoughts. If you’re seeing someone now, check with them before you start.

This is self-help education, not therapy, and it isn’t a crisis service. If you’re thinking about ending your life or you’re not safe, call or text 988 in the US and Canada, call Samaritans on 116 123 in the UK and Ireland, or find a free line at findahelpline.com. In immediate danger, call your local emergency number. More lines are on the help page.

Common questions

If it feels more like this

• Overthinking everything
• Rumination: going over and over the past
• Negative thoughts
• Pure O and intrusive thoughts
• Replaying the past: shame and old memories

Guides

• Worry postponement: how the worry window works
• Overthinking at night
• Rumination vs worry
• How to stop overthinking (without fighting your thoughts)

Sources