Dealing with a mistake when you have Anxiety
By: Daneh Irvine
Tags: Mental Health, Hope, Anxiety, Mistakes, Procrastination

So you wake up.

And you need to deal with that situation in your email inbox. Its right there on your computer. You are on your computer. You could just click on the icon. That’s all that needs to be done…click it.

But your brain is doing everything in it’s power to get away from that pain of looking at the situation. Anxiety has the amazing ability to make something as simple as looking at email the worst possible thing to wake up to, and how powerful it is.

Might as well check something else on social media first. You will do it right after?

You are waging the battle of Trafalgar or something in your head whilst everyone else is having a regular day out at the beach in theirs, or so it seems anyway. And for the most part its invisible to those around us. They can’t see the difficulty going on behind a straight face, but they will wonder why you haven’t done what they would have done already.

And now the deadline has come and gone, the situation has become worse, and feels even worse to deal with.

You aren’t lazy

The mental block caused by anxiety can be extremely difficult to overcome. Even if you want to accomplish something, there is an entire army of defence mechanisms trying to relieve the brain from the overwhelming stress of confronting it sees as a threat to our wellbeing. It’s fight or flight up in here, and its much safer to do flight first.

Getting past the distractions that you assume is procrastination is not as easy as advice on “how to stop procrastinating”, “how to organize your life”. You aren’t lazy or unmotivated. The motivation is there to achieve your goals, but the body is responding to a threat it sees within the anxiety.

Looking at the situation now you know you WANT to fix the situation, but every time you go near it you can feel the physiological changes in your body. The tension in your arms, shortened breathing and now the heart palpitations. The mental block is still there too, causing deep pain that doesnt have words connected to it. How do you even begin to push past all of this.

Breaking the mental block

So we have gotten to the point where the situation is getting worse the longer we wait, and the internet gives some unhelpful ideas about procrastination whilst we procrastinate. Trying to face the situation causes overwhelming symptoms of anxiety.

What to even do to break this block?

The one thing I learned was that sure breathing exercises to calm down help the symptoms of anxiety but it wouldn't walk me through how to overcome the mental block. The feelings are going to happen regardless. Trying to AVOID or calm them down was often making it worse. I was waiting to calm down before doing anything, ultimately allowing the feelings to come back when I tried again.

The main thing I learnt was to accept that I was having this physiological reaction but also, accept that I had messed up and it was going to be fixable one way or another. It has already happened, and we can only accept that this was our reaction and we will be feeling this for now. The emotional pain is going to happen and things may even be in a difficult situation. But even if it does, the other side of it wont feel so bad at all maybe even better!