How To Deal With Anxiety That Causes You To Procrastinate
By: James Ssekamatte
Tags: Personal Development, Productivity, Anxiety, Personal Growth, Procrastination

How To Deal With Anxiety That Causes You To Procrastinate

Practical steps to transform unproductive time and get back on track James Ssekamatte Jun 2·11 min read

Photo by Nik Shuliahin on Unsplash

I have been writing this article on and off again for several weeks, probably months, now. It’s not that I’m lazy nor do I feel like giving up. Far from it. It was rather intentional, and it was written at specific times, particularly in times when I felt anxious, tried to get myself back on track, and the specific methods that helped me achieve that effectively.

After over 10+ weeks of constant trial and failure, these are my go-to habits that actually helped—and how I executed them to help me become productive again.

Why I Am Writing This Right Now

For a long time, I have had episodes like this where I spend an entire day—or days—doing nothing. It can be easy to forget how awful this condition really is when I do get myself back into productivity.

This meant that every time anxiety set in, it always felt like a new and independent experience of its own that I had not experienced before. But this of course isn’t true. So this time when I realized that I was caught in this habit again, I decided, as I tried to solve the problem, I would also document the methods that brought me back into my productive zone.

The never-ending process of feeling like we need to keep moving or risk deterioration is real. Many of us handle these low points in our progress quite the same with a few deviations since the main theme during the time we are unproductive is fear, procrastination, and/or perceived laziness.

When I mercilessly bite my fingernails or watch countless YouTube videos, all I’m doing is indulging in these quick reward activities while I rationalize that I will get to the “tough stuff” when I’m done indulging. This becomes a cycle of unending “afters” that feel impossible to break.

When it comes to writing, for example, I unwittingly reinforce my procrastination by checking my statistics. It hurts finding out that you have gone days without earning anything, and I cannot say that I don’t care. I do. Writing, in general, is not my main source of income but the progress or lack of it is still meaningful to me.

Who Is This For

As much as this article talks about anxiety, it is addressed specifically to its impact on our productivity. We tend to be both productive and unproductive and this article is meant to explore the unproductive times and hopefully provide practical and useful steps to help in getting rid of those that produce anxiety for us. (Not every “unproductive” time produces anxiety—sometimes we need healthy downtime.)

This is not a guide on the extreme conditions of anxiety, such as mental illness. Some aspects of anxiety are related to mental health conditions and should be treated as such. If you are experiencing massive anxiety, I doubt whether you will find any help here. Seek help instead through professional mental health practitioners.

Criteria for Evaluating Effectiveness of Techniques

It can take me quite a long time to get out of these anxiety episodes. This could mean several days or weeks of me nail-biting and procrastinating in every single way imaginable. Also, some times of day are better than others. I feel more inspired to write in the evening. My anxiety is a little less at that time, making it easier for me to push through and write, even when I feel down.

This is why I tried tactics at different times of day, different days of the week, and through different weeks. The ones that were effective across these variables will make it to this list in the form of detailed methods.

In the morning especially, however much I try to write for long, I always find myself dozing off (which is what I’m doing as I am typing this, lol). So I looked for techniques to combat the feeling of drowsiness in the middle of doing important work.

I do not think that there is any single method that will always work all the time. I also don’t think that there is any method that will completely get rid of the unproductive streaks that may show up in the future, and I am not sure that I want this, either.

What I can count on however is this: having several potential courses of action helps me (and hopefully you) try out different options when situations like this happen again. Having several courses of action means that if any one of the methods fails to work at some point, chances are that another one will work and this article makes sure that I have all those options.

The 5-Minute Method

This is a momentum-building method of making a deal with yourself to do “the thing” for just five minutes. I have found it so easy to just implement it almost always at command. It is not fully meant to pull you out of your low state into productivity, but it gives you the initial push you need to get going. There is a lot of documentation that has been made on why it is effective and how to get it done. So the idea is not original, but it seems to work for a lot of people, including me.

There have been many times when I have been watching a YouTube video, and I employed this method. Whenever I do this, I instantly find myself switching off all the distractions and just getting on to what I am supposed to do. This is always my favorite option when I find myself falling into states of anxiety and laziness.

In my work, I have also found it very effective not just in procrastination but also in task switching. I am a writer, artist, engineer, and designer. The skills I have built up in all those fields require that I show up constantly not only for the improvement but also for the work I do as a freelancer in some of them. But oftentimes, I don’t get so much motivation and productivity after I have done work in some of them and when that happens, I use this method in order to build up momentum for the next task I have to get done that day.

The technique

It is basically making yourself take five minutes to concentrate on the work at hand, with the idea that you can then go do something else. Simple as that may sound, it often failed for me until I promised myself a reward if I did the five minutes.

It reminds me of rewards when I was a kid. In my case, there was a rule that I had to sleep from 2 p.m. till 4 p.m. every day so that I would not fall asleep too early in the night before eating my dinner. For every time I slept during an afternoon, I got rewarded with watching Dexter or any other episode on cartoon network in the evening.

As much as I hated sleeping in the afternoon, I knew that watching cartoons in the evening depended on whether I slept or not. And so I did. This work-reward model does not change when we grow up.

The five minutes has to come with an incentive to do them. If I try to brute force my brain into doing five minutes of work, it is highly ineffective and more so, I often won’t do more than that. Your five minutes should come with an incentive, too. It should be something that your brain takes pleasure in doing.

When you promise yourself that you will have a reward after doing at least five minutes of work, you will find yourself more engaged in the process and this will make your momentum boost much more effective. Of course, most times you will find that this will get you much further than just five minutes because your brain knows that the real reward is getting the work done. Double rewards!

Giving yourself five minutes to do something when you are in a state of anxiety must start as a mental process. In your mind, you compassionately lure your brain into what you want to do. In your mind, just think of what you are going to do and then also think about what you are going to do after getting in your five minutes of work. You will naturally start feeling energized and when this happens, just get to work and forget about counting the time. For this reason, I even remove all time-telling devices from view and concentrate. This helps me build momentum so that by the time I hit five minutes, I am so involved in the process that I don’t even consider stopping.

When I was writing this section, I was not feeling productive at all. I didn’t want to even look at my writing canvas before I started. But carefully convincing my brain that I would spend only five minutes writing it after which I would watch an episode of Enochian investigations (yes, I love mysteries of history), I was able to write this whole section without any problems and with a lot of enthusiasm.

Convince yourself to spend five minutes doing work with an incentive attached to that action so that it can help you get your brain and mind on board to get you started. Get rid of time-telling devices like phones and watches for those “five minutes” and just stay laser-focused regardless of the time until you feel you have done enough. And then receive the reward.

Why it works

There are many times when I have tried to do this, and it failed in the past. So I decided to modify it to play with my pleasure centers as a way of convincing myself that I should be doing work instead of railing in anxiety.

“Pleasure is not a luxury, but a psychological need.” — Nathaniel Branden

Whenever I don’t find pleasure in something I am doing, it takes a lot of mental effort, and it always produces less than ideal results.

For me, pleasure comes from a lot of personal time. This can mean things like watching movies or YouTube videos, taking walks, and scrolling through social media.

When I binge-watch, part of me will be having fun with that while another part of me will be anxious and pushing me to stop and do my work. With necessities, this doesn’t activate the reward centers of my brain the same way that pleasure does. (Think about when you last had fun just because of having a roof over your head.)

After noticing the difference between a necessity and an indulgence, the key is that if I can identify when I am engaging in an indulgence activity, that is when I should employ this five-minute technique. And that is the kind of thing that I can use as a motivating reward.

The Neutralization Technique

This is a method where activities that cause an extreme emotional swing to one side are compensated by other activities that cause an opposite emotional swing so that the net experience is neutral. In simple physics, action and reaction are equal and opposite.

I decided to experiment with that physics principle and come up with a technique in which one activity is meant as a neutralizer since I multitask a lot. Normally when people multitask, they are involved in several activities that are very important. This is not what I am talking about. In the neutralization technique, one activity that is relaxing or highly pleasurable is used to neutralize high-stress activity.

I have an online store for example that I started in December 2020, and it currently has about 8,300 products. Double that product number and you will get the number of products I have listed on other sites besides the first one. But I hate listing those products because it is very painful… mentally and physically exhausting. So how then did I get 16,000+ products listed in a period of six months? One, of course, has to do with automation of some part, but also by the use of this neutralizing technique.

I decided to neutralize the mental exhaustion with pleasurable activities — watching TikTok videos among other things.

Here is how it works

In simple terms, I watch these videos while uploading and optimizing my work, but there is more to it than that. It is not just Tik Tok videos that do the magic; I also use binaural beats, music, audiobooks, and so much more.

Some writers like Tim Denning have used binaural beats to remain focused while writing. I prefer audiobooks and podcasts when I am painting and binaural beats when I am coding. But when I am uploading files onto my online store, Tik Tok does the magic.

These activities like binaural beats, music, listening to music, or watching TikTok videos are extremely pleasurable, and they don’t seem like work. They, therefore, keep the body active and lively while I do something that requires too much mental effort to focus after a short time.

These activities’ dopamine-inducing effects neutralize the negative mental swing that comes with doing mundane and tiresome acts. The result is a neutral mood that anchors my focus on the task at hand.

How you can use it

If you are using a high level of concentration in your work that is exciting on its own, then there might not be any need to use this method. But when you find yourself unproductive and doing work that takes too much mental energy but won’t be affected by multi-tasking, then this method can be very useful in remaining focused for a long time while doing that work.

Revisit Past Successes

This is a method where you find a reason to boost your motivation by anchoring your progress on past achievements.

Say you are unmotivated in doing something creative like art. If you have done some art pieces in the past, you can then revisit them. This can help you tap into the emotions you had while creating them and—most importantly—the emotions you had when you completed them.

For me, videos in which I recorded myself doing the work are the most effective in doing this. But it can also be work that I have written in the past, programs that I have made in scratch, Python or C, and so on. This is what I call the low-hanging fruit. I call it so because this work has already been done by me and yet it carries with it a lot of useful emotions that I can tap into to make me more productive.

This technique is also very useful when you find yourself at the lowest point of despair. There are times when I cannot even open up my editor to start writing or when I can’t even sit in front of my canvas to start drawing or painting. When it gets this bad, I always try to use this method, and sometimes, it inspires me enough to kick me back into action.

I also don’t just find the low-hanging fruit in my past work. Sometimes, I find it by looking at other people’s work.

Conclusion

These methods have helped me pick myself up from unproductive times, and I hope they can help you in some way too.

I have found that it's important to have several ways to approach a problem, and therefore I don’t think that these are the only methods available at your disposal. But, I know that you will find even more that can be useful in keeping you productive when you need to be. Therefore, explore and expand this list to form even more solutions for the problem of being very unproductive.