What to do with a worry that won't shut off

Get a pen and a piece of paper. Not the notes app. Paper, because your phone is a slot machine and you'll be gone in ninety seconds.

Now write down every single thing bothering you. Not tidy. Not in order. The chemistry test, the thing you said at lunch on Tuesday, whether your knee is going to hold up for the season, the fact that your mom and dad have been quiet with each other lately. Keep going until the pen stops.

Most people have between five and twelve things on that page. It feels like two hundred when it's swirling around unlisted. That's the first trick, and it's not a small one: a worry you can't name has no edges, so your brain treats it as infinite.

Split the list into two piles

Go down your list and mark each one A or B.

A means there's an action. A real, physical next step you could take this week. "I don't understand quadratics" has an action. "Ask Mr. Bailey for ten minutes after class Thursday."

B means there's nothing to do. Waiting on results. Something already said. Somebody else's decision. "Will my grandma's scan come back clear" is a B. No amount of thinking about it moves it a millimeter.

For every A, write the next action next to it. Not the whole plan. One step, small enough that you could do it tomorrow before lunch. Then put a day on it.

The Bs are the hard ones, and the honest answer is that you carry them. You don't solve them. What you can do is stop feeding them — and the way you feed a B is by turning it over and over at eleven at night as though this time you'll crack it.

Give the worry an appointment

Pick ten minutes. Same time most days. Say, 5:30, after school, before dinner.

That's your worry window. Sit down with the list and worry on purpose. Properly. Let it be as bad as it wants to be for ten minutes.

When a worry turns up outside the window — and it will, in the middle of a free period, in the middle of a conversation — you say to it, not out loud unless you want your friends concerned, not now, 5:30. Then go back to what you were doing.

This sounds like a party trick and it isn't. It works because your brain keeps re-presenting a worry when it thinks you're ignoring it. Give it a scheduled hearing and it stops shouting. Not immediately. Give it a week and a half before you decide.

The trade-off: some days you'll sit down at 5:30 and nothing comes. You'll feel silly. Sit there anyway. The appointment is the point.

One in the morning is a liar

Everything is worse at 1 a.m. Your judgment at 1 a.m. is roughly the quality of your judgment when you've got the flu, and you wouldn't make a life decision with the flu.

So make a rule: no decisions after ten. No sending the message. No deciding you're quitting the team. No deciding what somebody meant by what they texted. Write it on the paper and deal with it at 5:30 tomorrow.

Then get out of bed. If you've been lying there more than twenty minutes, staying is training your body to think bed means spiraling. Go sit somewhere else with a boring book and a lamp until you're heavy-eyed.

The stuff underneath matters too, and it's unglamorous. Caffeine after about 2 p.m. is still in you at midnight, so that 4 p.m. energy drink is a decision about your sleep, not your afternoon. Eat breakfast, because running on nothing until 1 p.m. makes everything feel steeper than it is. Get outside and move, even fifteen minutes around the block with the phone in your pocket. None of that fixes a real problem. All of it changes how big the problem feels, which is often the difference between coping and not.

How to actually start the conversation

The reason most girls don't tell a parent isn't that they think their parents won't care. It's that they can't picture the first sentence.

So steal one.

• "Can I talk to you about something? I don't need you to fix it, I just need you to hear it."
• "I've been stressed for a few weeks and it's not getting better and I don't really know why."
• "Something happened and I'm scared you're going to be angry, and I need to tell you anyway."

Pick the moment on purpose. In the car is the best room in the house. Nobody has to make eye contact, there's a clear end to it, and neither of you can walk off. Doing dishes works for the same reason. Ten-thirty at night at the foot of the stairs doesn't work, for either of you.

And tell them what you want from the conversation, because parents default to solving. If you say "I don't need answers, I need you to listen for ten minutes," most will do exactly that. They just didn't know that was on offer.

If home isn't the first door

Sometimes the thing you're carrying is about your family, or you've got a dad who's brilliant but goes straight into repair mode, or you're just not there yet.

Then go to another adult and go this week. Your school counselor. A teacher you already like. The school nurse. A youth leader at church. An aunt, a grandmother, a coach. Adults who work with teenagers have heard harder things than yours before breakfast, and it's literally the job.

Say this: "I need to talk to someone and I didn't know who to ask."

That's the whole opening. It's enough.

One thing to be straight about: a good adult will usually want your parents brought in eventually, and they'll help you do it. That's not betrayal. That's an adult with a plan making sure you're not holding something alone at fifteen that a grown woman would struggle with at forty.

What friends can and can't carry

Your best friend is the right person for most of it. She's the wrong person for some of it.

She's wrong for it when you're checking in with her four times a day for reassurance about the same fear, because reassurance is a snack and the worry gets hungry again in an hour. She's wrong for it when she's fourteen and you're describing something that needs an adult and a phone call. That's not a comment on how good a friend she is. It's a comment on what's fair to hand a fourteen-year-old.

And if she comes to you with something that scares you, you're allowed to say, "I love you, I'm not letting go, and we're telling someone." Then go with her.

The lines where you tell someone today

Some things don't go in the worry window and don't wait for a good moment in the car.

If you're thinking about hurting yourself, or you've stopped wanting to be here, tell a parent or the school counselor today. If someone is hurting you. If someone is pressuring you, about pictures or anything else. If an adult, or someone you met online, is asking you to keep a secret from your family — that last one isn't a gray area, it's the whole tell.

You won't be in trouble. I'd bet a lot on that, and so would anyone who's watched how parents actually react when their daughter finally says the hard sentence. The fear of their reaction is almost always bigger than the reaction.

Put the paper somewhere you'll see it tomorrow. Do the one small A-thing you wrote down. Then go be fifteen for a while.