Procrastination Anxiety

Hi, my name is Genesee and I’m a chronic procrastinator. I would love to say that I have moved past it, but it still hijacks my ideal plans from time to time. I knew my ADHD was a factor for so many reasons but I chalked most of this up to the anxiety I feel about having to do certain things, a sentiment that I’m sure many of you understand. I hate making phone calls. I have a deep fear of driving to and parking at places that I have never been before. It can spend an hour or more proofreading a five-line email that should have taken five minutes. In short, anxiety makes doing simple tasks not only time-consuming but mentally exhausting, and therefore, easy to justify putting off. When you already have a limited amount of energy and focus, it truly becomes a nightmare. 

When I decided to work on breaking my procrastination habit, I dug deep to find the root of these anxieties. The glaring answer was my tendencies towards perfectionism, which used to be a source of pride for me before I accepted that it is not always working in my favor. While this was an important thing to acknowledge, the biggest realization that I had was that my procrastination wasn’t just from my anxiety, but it was also creating it. 

Not only was I worried about performing the task itself, but I was also worried about so many other details and consequences. Even if I put my best work out there, a missed deadline is still an inconvenience to others. It is hard to do your best when you know it's not going to be good enough one way or another. 

The longer I procrastinated on something, the more guilt and shame I felt, which in turn fueled my anxieties even more. It is a vicious cycle. I began to notice that those bad feelings were weighing on me more than the initial anxiety I had about doing the thing to begin with, which was still there too. 

There were some areas in my life that my chronic procrastination was repeatedly causing problems. My schedule was thrown out of whack from having a backlog of tasks. Things started slipping through the cracks that I never intended on dropping. They say that the root of all personal change is getting tired of your own bullshit, and that is exactly what happened. 

Fighting off anxiety is only half of the battle, though. Problems with task initiation are a hallmark of ADHD. It makes it SO difficult to start everything, either because of motivation issues or having the inability to link your end goal with your current situation and pull together a plan to progress. Not to mention the whole new set of problems that come with executing that plan. First, I decided to focus on smaller or more familiar tasks to work on the anxiety issues without contending with debilitating ADHD symptoms. Fixing ADHD-related problems with my workflow would come later when I tackled larger tasks. 

I started pushing through the anxiety to complete those smaller items on my to-do list that I knew I could handle as soon as possible. When I started pushing myself to tackle things as soon as they arose, I noticed that they got easier and easier to do. The more phone calls I made, the less painful I found them to be. I got more comfortable sending email replies right away, even if it was only to say that I received the message and I would be getting back to them with a more detailed response later. The more often I went grocery shopping, the better I got at organizing my grocery list and shopping effectively. 

Completing these things without pressure to do them perfectly or with a quick turnaround time to make up for past deadlines gave me the mental energy I needed to improve in those areas. My perfectionism is still alive and well, so permitting myself to let things be good enough was a struggle but I am finding that taking the time to go back and fix things as needed is so much less time-consuming than stressing over rolling out every last detail perfectly. 

The anxieties related to doing something versus the anxieties related to procrastinating it are two very different beasts. Realizing that was a total game-changer for me. Committing to diminishing the “doing it” anxiety through practice takes a lot less energy than constantly dealing with the “dreading it” anxiety, which snowballs into shame and guilt and can even get worse over time when it starts causing problems in your life. The first one you can tackle in bite-sized pieces, but the other will hang over you.

As someone who lives with both mental and physical illnesses, I know that anxiety and ADHD are not the only roots of procrastination. As my physical illness worsens, I find myself regularly reestablishing what my baseline is. I often take on more work than I can handle, thinking that I have the energy to complete it, only to force myself to delay it to keep my health in balance. Sometimes other things outside of our control make time management complicated. But if we go into it with the right mindset, not only will we get shit done, we will be one step closer to having a level mindset and healthy workflow.