Ask HN: How to break anxiety/fear-avoidance cycle?

What I did was multiple things:

1.Learn from the best. There are people around you that probably has not this problem and can do the work. Study what they do and feel. Just ask them what they do and observe. They will have a different personality that you have, but it will be very useful anyway.

2. Keep a journal and write it down what you feel and why you feel something. This requires practice, you get better over time and will know thyself much better.

3. Read(or hear) books like: https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Now-Habit-Audiobook/B002V8L1E...

And follow the mantra that is there to eliminate thoughts about the past and about the future every time you start working. Again you improve over time and you won't need it after a while as it will become automatic.

4. Write Check lists with your work todos (roadmap) and follow them so you can split your thinking on "deciding what to do" and then "doing it" and not thinking at all after the decisions were made.

5.Use relaxing music that you enjoy so it pushes you up continuously while whatever you hate pushes you down. I use "Satie" music for hours.

6. Take breaks and vacations. Sleep and eat well. See your friends and family. I take 10 minutes off every 50 min of hard work.

7. Monitor and record your effort level. You can expect someone to walk for 8 hours a day, but no human being can run for 8 hours a day, most of them can't even run for 1 hour. People understand that but do not understand that with mental processes it is the same.

Running is inefficient when you could walk. For making your effort level go down you can use tools(think on a bicycle that lets you run without effort, a car or a plane) or delegate to people/companies that specialize in your big effort task way cheaper that what it cost you.

8. Make things smaller in your checklist so you always progress and have positive feedback. Celebrate everything you check.

9. Understand that some times pain is unavoidable, but usually it comes at the start of the task. Usually the reward comes at the end. If you get used to complete things, you get used to the reward and you train your body that completing new things is enjoyable.

On the other hand, if you are used to not complete things you are only used to the pain, and you have trained your body to learn that doing the work is painful. You probably even try to punish yourself more into doing something, so your emotional "gut" associates, links or anchors doing tasks with pain.

I think it matters because the treatments and prognosis for anxiety and depression are usually quite different. For example, the mindset if you have long-term anxiety disorder should be "how can I treat this?" but the mindset if you have long-term depression (dysthymia/persistent depression) should be "how can I cope/live with this?"

I definitely agree with your second paragraph. I would actually extrapolate it slightly further and say that it's worth OP asking themselves if they actually simply feel unmotivated, and anxiety is a good way to pin that fact on something tangible or understandable. If my hypothesis that it is a depressive disorder is correct, I think that is quite likely. But that's a question for OP, obviously not one that I can infer.

"You must move beyond your shame and guilt that keeps you afraid and alone, and you must have a regular two-way relationship with a community of your peers and betters that you all use to help each other out of these sorts of blocking situations."

I'll second this. Realizing that you aren't alone is a big relief.

I can relate to this quite a bit, I personally think it is my biggest weakness. I have managed to do a few things despite this but just as an example, a few weeks ago I could not bring myself to work on a 5 minute presentation about work that was already done months ago because the feelings related to the work were very strong. Instead I 'winged' it, and it went ok (stakes were low, as I mentioned before, I had already done some work for this for an unrelated presentation), but really it didn't convey the work that was done as well as possible. It also didn't need to be as hard as I made it ( I spent the day before fretting about it, looking at it for a few minutes, but not doing much about it ). The irony is that the worst case scenario of showing up without much prepared was not nearly as bad as my anxiety made it seem the day before, and that anxiety made it hard to prep... So the anxiety was completely off and just made my life harder than it needed to be.

I'm pretty sure this anxiety/avoidance pattern that I manage to some extent has in the past cost me years because I know it has delayed my engaging with the things I need to do to move forward. I love working, thinking, reading, prioritizing, but I do think I have trouble regulating my emotions in certain situations more than other people I know.

My limited advice since I haven't figured it out: 1. Some amount of therapy. I have done some CBT. Lately I have been reading a bit about ACT, seems related to this specific problem more so than CBT. It is ok to have bad feelings sometimes, they pass, don't worry about worrying. (Easier said than done.) This is an ongoing process and can help you think through patterns like this. 2. I find that sometimes too much thinking early on can make things worse, and things are done faster if you don't think too much before jumping up on something. 3. Focusmate.com: you tell someone what you'll work on for the next 30 mins, and you do it. Somehow having someone else there that you're accountable to, as well as who doesn't know you, makes some of the emotions recede for me a bit, enough for me to get started somehow. 4. Articulate to yourself, as if you were explaining to someone else, what makes the thing hard. Sometimes I feel calmer after this. 5. Reframe the situation: maybe you can find some other situations where you are successful against this pattern and try to remember them. Can you make the same happen here even in a small way? Can you fight back a bit? Short term stress is not that harmful to you and you may want to see it positively, see some positive properties of it in your work. Eg. sometimes when things are quite critical I somehow manage to break from the avoidance and do something. 5. Perfectionism is an enemy, and guilt follows. I find guilt over previous avoidance is a secondary effect that makes things even worse. Eg. when I finally get to something I have avoided, I feel guilt over how much time I avoided it and how it really isn't so bad. Checking your own patterns may help you realize this is a familiar pattern and just that. 6. Work with other people or run your thoughts through other people. This is not always possible, I'm a PhD student so it is especially hard to do this (your work is ultimately your own and no one will drive it forward but you, but you can try running your thoughts through someone else), but I find in a team (even just 2 people) I find myself very mindful of not imposing any of my perfectionistic tendencies on the people I work with. This in turn helps me regulate them more. 7. Get good sleep. It helps me be able to step away from myself and think of myself more in the third person than when I don't sleep enough. 8. Get some exercise. I find it is helpful in breaking through some of the rumination/avoidance cycles. 9. Share some of these emotions/situations with other people (what I'm doing right now ;)). It is easy to also start avoiding people in these anxiety/avoidance loops, I certainly feel that impulse, but you may find other people can relate and even have some advice. If your feelings can change this way you may be able to get some work done.

A very good advice. When I am stuck worrying and not doing a task I should have been doing, I try with a small pomodoro interval of just 15 mins doing very minimal steps related to the task that won't need lot of mental energy. This helps me to reduce my anxiety and gradually I pick up my focus and am able to move forward.