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.