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

If you are about to fail a class or out of school due to anxiety, go and tell someone.

This happens all the time so there will be standard things they can do about it, routines, process and guidelines etc.

When stressed things can seem epic and scary, which makes it hard to reach out.

Long term:

This sounds like ADHD to me. It might be partially anxiety, depression and other things mixed in. It's hard to tell as they can cause and worsen each other.

Try all the standard advice for stress and procrastination and see what works for you. Do you have a sporty hobby, try doing more of that. Is your diet or sleep schedule crap, sort that out. Read about the physical impacts of stress so you can recognize the feeling and find some method that works to chill you out, whether that's meditation or going for a walk or reading a book. Find stupid tricks that work for your brain (study buddies, pomodoro timers, breaking things down into smaller tasks, starting the task while intentionally not caring if it's perfect or even good just to get going, there's lots of different tricks that work for different people at different times).

The idea of radical honesty is to avoid all forms of "dishonesty" which also includes omission. If you are feeling or experiencing something, you have to accept it and articulate it even that entails becoming vulnerable and losing some of the metaphorical shield that protects you.

In the example above: radical honesty is admitting that we are trying to protect our ego from being punctured by avoiding what is making us uncomfortable.

Radical acceptance calls for the acceptance of the current circumstances, i.e. expressing it is what it is, and trying to make the best of the situation. I can't change the fact that I am not as intelligent as Terrence Tao or Erik Demaine even though our childhoods up to a point were identical. The past can't change because the future wants it, so might as well try to create a future that doesn't want to change the past.

In the example above, radical acceptance for me was accepting that I can't just sit in the class and absorb the material as I did in undergrad, but instead I had to actively work for it to get the same grades.

Interesting thought about global leaderboards. I wonder if they are so big, that it's easy to dismiss though. I feel like there is an optimal size in between, sort of like what's happened in sports in the past. As a kid got better, they would get moved to higher levels.

Problem here isn't mechanical, there are literally thousands of methods and tricks all over web to overcome procrastination. Its psychological issue.

What I would say is to really think about why you really want to not do the assigments. Is it because you ultimately think benefit of school is overstated. Maybe your passions lie somewhere else at the moment but you are forced to attend school because thats what we were told to do.

Only you can solve this issue.