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.
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.