Worry Time…the story so far

Digitising a CBT tool for young people.

We use groupwork based on Social Learning Theory and CBT to help young people with anxiety, worry, depression, low mood, behaviour, communication and relationship difficulties. But over the last year it’s pretty much been a story about anxiety and worry.

We introduced a new CBT tool called Worry Time (WT) into our groupwork last year — it’s a way of helping to manage worry without it consuming your every waking thought. It’s been popular with the young people we work with but, back in Autumn 2020 when we were part of the Catalyst Discovery programme, we had discovered that our young people were having trouble doing the 6 steps of WT. Why does that matter? Well for a couple of the steps, where you ground yourself or absorb yourself in a task after spending time thinking about your worry, needs to be done right otherwise you can end up with the opposite result to the one WT promises.

In the Discovery programme we worked through our user needs, assumptions, user research and came to the conclusion that what might help was an app to guide the YP through worry time, reminding them of each stage and logging their worries as they went. A bit like the storyboard above. We applied for more funding to see what was possible next.

Fast forward to Feb 2021 and we find ourselves in week 1 of the Definition programme. That familiar mix of excitement and nervousness about how this programme would run. Two of us were working on it this time and we had 10 weeks rather than 4 which felt great to be less intense and more focussed on our individual charity needs through our mentor Mille.

In week 3 it was great to revisit our user needs statement from the Discovery programme…and whether it was still right. This is something personally I’ve really appreciated about this programme. It’s ok to circle back and check you are still in the right place — and if not that’s ok.

Week 4 we gathered together members of our wider team who deliver the Worry Time session in our groupwork sessions. A frank conversation was had — and we concluded that maybe the way in which we taught the young people to do Worry Time could be better. there’s so many factors at play

• where the WT section falls in a group — if it’s in the last session we can’t check and troubleshoot
• how much time gets dedicated to it depends on what else has happened in that session
• the young person might not be in the right frame of mind to take it in or might miss that session
• different people deliver messages slightly differently

It felt quite brave come to this conclusion — that maybe we need a better way of ensuring everyone gets the opportunity to learn WT in the same way. It feels even braver to share it here!

In week 5, at the Digital Service Design workshop there was a slide that made sense of what we were finding — there we were concentrating on improving the product ‘Worry Time’ by looking for a digital way of young people doing it. But the service surrounding it — how we were teaching it — was a big influence on how successful the product could be. Time to…