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 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.