Here’s how to lock up your worries

Homeless, unemployed, crazy, fugitives and runaways – they are especially striking on the streets of cities when others are well-fed, accustomed to success at work or at the dentist. But maybe we’re all just pretending to defend ourselves against the demands of life. In reality, however, we have resigned ourselves to the fact that they are the end of their dogs, bottles, woolen blankets, and we are the end of our pleasures, homes, desires.

Summer is over. It was dry, overheated, flooded. How cold will the winter be? How many deaths will it bring? How much fear, poverty, loneliness? Does the world have a future? I have a future How miserable will this future be? Completely unhappy or almost unhappy? Or even almost unhappy? Can we hope for some sort of breakthrough? So many doubts, questions, uncertainties.

Striving for unambiguous

The “need for completion” is what psychologists call the desire to get clear answers, to ward off everything ambiguous. On the one hand, they see this as a danger, because it makes a person susceptible to authoritarian ideologies. On the other hand, psychology also understands what motivates you to finish something as soon as possible.

Li Xiuping of the National University of Singapore and her colleagues took “closure” literally: they explored whether it was possible to alleviate or even make unpleasant feelings disappear, that is, something psychological, by creating a physical equivalent and physically blocking it.

The envelope matters

And indeed: it works. Li’s research team asked the students to write down the decision they regret, put the paper in an envelope, seal it, and mail it. The control group also recorded an act of remorse, but without inserting the paper into the envelope. Then it turned out that those who had an envelope felt much better than those who did not.

So it’s scientifically proven that a worry eater is not a plush mythical creature. Anxiety Eater really works. He eats worries. Make yourself a worry eater. Everything will be fine.

Ursula von Arx finds it hard to believe that closing her worries should be more important than writing them down. Is that why there are lockable diaries? Von Arx writes to Bleek every second Monday.