Often I end up closing the list and immediately turning to self-soothing. And because there’s no way to know in advance if a task on the list will give me anxiety, this often results in my list being not just unusable but unreadable, preventing me from doing or even remembering the non-anxiety tasks on the same list.
Two things I learned from therapy that have helped me:
-
Journal anything that’s upsetting you. Just writing something out can help you figure out what exactly you’re anxious about, because for me anyway it was almost never “ordering groceries” or something similar, but things from my past that were making me anxious about the task
-
The most uncomfortable part is starting. If you do something for 5 minutes that’s usually enough to overcome the stress/anxiety of starting, and if it isn’t then you can come back to it and try again later
I agree. I literally just journaled 1000 words because of a very small issue I fixated on that a larger issue was hiding behind.
Took 15 min, but now i’m productive again.
-
Sounds like a really tough situation!
If I might change the angle here, the anxiety sounds like it’s really overwhelming beyond what I would expect from just the list.
It might be worth trying to nail down what exactly is giving you grief, and seeing if you can do anything to work on that.
If it’s generalised to the point where it really is just the list, maybe start small. Give yourself a hard limit where you only have a few things on there, and make sure they aren’t stuff that will cause you anxiety. If even that doesn’t work, you might need more help. There’s no shame in that either, I’ve gone on some stuff to help sleep and it’s made a world of difference for me.
Can you get something with a widget that just shows the current or next task? All the goodness of list without the overwhelm of list
I would say fuck to-do lists but I need them to remind me to hate on them… btw you may want to look into PDA.
I love PDA! I kiss my wife any and everywhere. I don’t need a reminder for that.
I had the same problem with my email. It sucks but just keep exposing yourself to it so it becomes less daunting. Maybe have it somewhere constantly visible or in your routine? Either way, I hope you over come it and you can do it!
I went another way with email… I aggressively archive everything that isn’t fucking important when I see it - if I’m in a mood to read about the latest factorio dev diary when I see it I’ll read it but I don’t hang on to emails that I might want later.
Shit like bills and legal stuff is the only thing I let sit around.
I just wrote something similar. One thing that helps is there tends to be emails I can deal with so it sorta helps working you up to the anxious ones by just dealing with spam or emails of little significance.
Don’t look at the list when anxious ;)
What I mean is I set up text to speech to read items scheduled on my todo list.
So if stuck on couch, I hear the todo read out loud.
This is 95% effective medicated, 10-60% unmedicated.
The other thing I found is the overwhelm comes from so many things.
Experiment with only letting 1, 3, 5 etc items be visible at a time. I sometimes go as far as saying top 3 are must do, 12 or however many remaining are optional.
Also also play your favorite video game sound like Mario coin when a todo is completed.
