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.
Are you on any medication? That makes a big difference for my anxiety.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
Two things I learned from therapy that have helped me:
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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
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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
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