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.
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.
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.
-
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.
love your enthusiasm for your wife ☺️ but they probably meant pathological demand avoidance (PDA)
I genuinely thought they meant a personal digital assistant to keep track of todos and stuff
yes! I mean pathological demand avoidance, I literally forgot there is another meaning to the acronym 🤣
Are you on any medication? That makes a big difference for my anxiety.
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.
You should limit how much of the list you can see and remove any items that can go on a calendar. Seeing a list of like twenty things I needed to do would be absolutely trigger my anxiety so I set appointments to do things so that I’m never looking at more than two or three tasks at once (I also have an awesome spouse who will drip feed me tasks that I need to do around the house).
I find having the full list in front of me does the same so I break the list down into bite size bits
I don’t need my full week plan in front of me all the time, but today’s list is pretty important and usually only has a couple things on it
And the tasks on the list aren’t monolithic big things but the small things that make the big things
Like I have to rebuild and redeploy my server with a new build, then rebuild my network around it. That’s not one item on the list but a huge amount of items. “Install Linux Mint on Laptop, get new backup drive for NAS data, copy data to new drive, build system in new case, move drives and install TrueNAS, etc, etc” all spread onto different days when possible.
Manageable bites will help a lot
Congratulations on making that observation. I know I frequently have problems because I’m just oblivious to my own mental state. I’m to busy with what I am doing that I don’t pay attention to what I am doing. So good job noticing. The best suggestion I have I to make time to observe the emotion. Next time it happens to make a few minutes of time to just experience and think about that feeling.
Thanks. That’s what I’ve been doing today, post-realization, is sitting with the knowledge and how it makes me feel.
I do that without even having a list. sometimes I have anxiety at looking at my email because I keep a bunch to remind me of things I have to do even emailing myself to make a task. so I guess I sorta do have a list.
well no more notes its working the same for me, without a reminder to remind me that im doing shit and btw making me feel guilty.
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
Hey! I have this same problem BAD and I finally just accepted it and now I have multiple places I keep lists.
I ended up building a bookmarklet that you can take notes on for when you need to write something down but the “wall of awful” caused by opening your main Todo list app is too much. It’s free and you can check it out here
