Anybody else here procrastinate out of anxiety?

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Anxiety is definitely what leads me to procrastination and not getting things done. I have a very bad "fear of failure" and part of why I hesitate to do things is because I'm scared that I will do them wrong.

Yes and that's so crazy man.

It often happens like this: I plan to do something, but the fear of failure makes me excessively research about this subject to feel more confident. But when I start to feel like I'm close to know enough to put that into practice, I start to avoid reading more about that to keep this state of "I still have to learn more" which is just an excuse to not do that at all.

This fear of taking the next step and facing new situations has been with me during my whole life.

I never procrastinated with my schoolwork. In fact, I always started right away and finished early. I saw what happened to other students who left their studies to the last minute and it was a big push to get everything done. I wanted to avoid that kind of thing like the plague. It worked for me. Many students were playing catch up, while I had the week free before finals just to study my notes for the finals.

On the other hand, I feel as though I fell way behind in learning about life-as much as 30 years behind. In some areas, I will never catch up.

If you push past the anxiety, to do everything without hesitation, always, I believe that would look like an impulse control disorder, or possibly like Tourette's.

The discussion is really about impulsivity, rather than caution.

I think, when you are apprehensive, you should itemize that

What you are telling us affects your basic living needs and job security, ongoing.

I can procrastinate from fear of failure if it's something new and I'm not sure if I can handle it or not. I'll also procrastinate sometimes if it's something requiring me to ask something from someone else, especially if i don't know that person well or at all, as that can be really scary for me, too. As a kid, I'd procrastinate with school assignments pretty badly, but got better about that in college. With other stuff, I guess it depends.

Yes, I tend to freeze about acting on something I hate anyway, like doing my taxes, but I also freeze and procrastinate on creative projects you would think I would enjoy. I think I procrastinate on those because of perfectionist tendencies that make the process torture rather than fun.

Yes. Lately this very thing has been keeping me from getting things done. I think it stems from my "all or nothing" outlook on life This anxiety usually tends to be the start of the "nothing" aspect. I recognize but I cannot stand how it effects my life.

Leaving the house is hard! job searching is hard as well because contacting and then meeting for an interview is so anxiety inducing. I'm not so good with new people because my mind goes blank about what to describe myself as. Communication...

No niche interest or social biases? I bet there's a word for it.

My dad used that word so much when i was growing up, I thought my middle name was Procrastinate. Nobody knew what autism was in those days, so I didn't get to use anxiety as an excuse, but that's usually what it was, and people pressuring me about it only made things worse.

I did, however, have an obsessive interest in drawing, and that I pursued without any anxiety about whether or not I was good enough, I just kept at it because it was something I wanted to do, and I could get lost in it and shut out the world. I wasn't trying to prove anything, it was just a sort of therapy for me. I bought books on cartoon, comic book, and classical figure drawing and mostly just copied what I saw. I also copied a lot of stuff out of the comic books I loved - focusing on how the professionals drew certain body parts, musculature, eyes, etc. Eventually I got to be fairly competent. I never felt I was good enough to compete in the professional world of comic book artists, but I just kept doing it because I loved it.

In school, it helped keep my hands busy, so my ears could absorb what the teachers were saying - plus it gave me something to do while all the other kids were ignoring me. When I started drawing portraits of the girls in class, in high school, it sometimes helped start conversations I could never have initiated myself.

I've always told people who complement me on having talent, that I don't have talent - I'm a skilled hack. I've seen artists with talent - those people whose ability just flows down their arm and out the pencil onto the paper, looking perfect and complete every time. I can't do that. I have to draw, erase, redraw, change, and sometimes start over from scratch a few times before I get something to look the way I pictured it in my head, and often it never really does look like I intended it to, but it comes out acceptable anyway. I wasn't born with natural talent, I worked long and hard to learn every trick I know, but eventually I got fairly competent at it.

Just try not to be so hard on yourself. Do it because you love to do it, the skill will come on it's own, in time. You may not even perceive it happening, but one day you'll finish something and think "Damn, that's a lot better than I could have done it a couple of years ago."

If I could live without leaving the farm, I would. On the farm, leaving the house to go out to the barn or the shop is not so bad because you won't meet anyone. The nearest neighbor is half a mile away across country, and a mile by road. It doesn't bother me at all to go to the garden (during the right time of year). Just to sit out in the yard for an afternoon is okay.

Yes, I procrastinate out of anxiety.

So much of this thread speaks to me.

I can usually "force" myself to do the things that have to be done. What bothers me most about this anxiety that makes me afraid to even, for example, even pick up the banjo, or get in the canoe. These are things I love and can lose myself in.

Too much. My ADD causes me to start multiple tasks simultaneously and gets me caught in a loop of obsessive, over- thinking and apprehension. This leads me on to do tasks that I know I can cope with and so I ignore urgent things that I find really difficult. I have been like this from birth and accept it as an unchangeable f...k up that is part of who I am. If the task is horrendously difficult but for someone elses benefit, amazingly I have more courage to do it. I actually put tasks I don't know how to tackle in an imaginary box and can actually pretend they don't exist or need dealing with. When I am dead and gone someone who enjoys unravelling complex f..k ups can have a lot of fun. There is no debt though, that would be heinously wicked

Yep. I do this all the time.

I wait till the very last possible moment frequently.

It's partially because of anxiety....and partially because of laziness.

Last edited by kraftiekortie on 09 Oct 2019, 8:43 am, edited 1 time in total.

I think it's the fear of the unpredictable that catches me in the procrastination loop, or the habit of thinking about fearing the unpredictable.