1Sometimes the help you need is not insight. It is someone sitting with you while you sort out what actually happened this week and which bit of it mattered.
When anxiety is running at full speed, everything arrives at the same volume and nothing can be ranked. A bad week becomes one undifferentiated bad week, and you cannot say why. Somebody else asking, gently, what happened on Tuesday, and what came before the worst hour, does work you genuinely cannot do from inside your own head. That is a real mechanism, not a lesser one.
Islamic evidence
We are well aware that your heart is weighed down by what they say (Quran 15:97), and what follows is not an argument but an instruction: celebrate the glory of your Lord and be among those who bow down to Him (Quran 15:98). The weight is acknowledged first, then something orderly and doable is given.
“We are well aware that your heart is weighed down by what they say”
Qur'an 15:97
“Celebrate the glory of your Lord and be among those who bow down to Him”
Qur'an 15:98
Psychological evidence
An experimental study of how socially anxious people think about a past event found that the mode mattered more than the amount. Abstract analytical going over carried different costs from concrete recall of what actually happened. Sorting a week into specific events sits on the concrete side of that line. It is one line of experimental work rather than a trial of this as a technique.
Wong QJ, Moulds ML. (2012). Journal of behavior therapy and experimental psychiatry · doi
Review detail
Why it works. Once events are laid out in order, the week stops being one solid block of dread and becomes things that happened.