I have found the anxiety of listing leads me to more destructive avoidance behaviors. Do you have this problem? What do you do about it?

Yes! Sometimes I’m so anxious people won’t like me I push them away before I can truly find out. I also project situations through me anxiety and tend to make them reality. In the future I will work on living in the moment and not creating situations before they even happen.

You hit the nail on the head here – listing, scheduling, planning can itself be an avoidance activity. And even when it's done meaningfully, just seeing all you have still to do can be daunting.

I find a good trick is to acknowledge that working on Todo lists is no substitute for actually powering through the list, and to set time aside not only for the planning, but also for the execution.

For instance, a daily 25 minutes slot where you put away distractions and start on your Todo by order of priority. Work not to the tasks (as in don't go in thinking "I'm going to complete those three tasks") but to the timer: "I'll only work on my to-do items for that time, and nothing else, I'll try to get as much done as possible, and whatever manages to get done within that time will be done, and whatever doesn't will get tackled tomorrow when I do it again"

Then once the execution habit is anchored and you do it naturally every day, you're a good ways towards beating procrastination!

I have the same problem. For me it helps to keep on track, to meditate every morning. I feel more calm and productive when I've done this. HTH, love Christine

I struggle with this too. I find that if I sit down, and look at the list and reorder it, it helps a lot! For example, if I sit down at my to do list and realize I’ve got far too much planned, I will draw an arrow like this -> in the checkbox I put next to it to signify it’s been moved to another day. In a way, it helps me feel like I’m still “taking care of it” without overwhelming myself with too much in one day. You can even go ahead and write it in on another day, so you know it’s not getting neglected! Next, I will reorder the list if I feel it’s necessary and/or star (*) the things that DEFINITELY need done and make sure I get that done. This is particularly helpful when I’ve gotten myself so anxious that I feel drained and have no motivation. I think just intentionally going through the to do list and thinking and prioritizing can help get you started; once you’ve gotten going, the anxiety about the items seems to dissipate some. Hope this helps!

Hey there! This question could not have reached me at a better time.

I used to have anxiety over the items on my to-do list. This was because when I wrote down a to-do, my mind was anxious if I’ll be able to accomplish this or not.

It’s basically like, I know I have to do something but I don’t know how I’m gonna do it, hence the anxiety.
So how do you overcome this?
Break down your to-do until you feel like the individual items are things that you know you can achieve for sure. Now looking at the to-do list won’t be daunting, it’ll be bunch of things that you know can be accomplished. I hope this helps. Enjoy!