To-Do Stress

NoSilverV asked:

What even is stress?!?!?!?! why can't i just go through my to-do list without stressing out!?!?!? is it fake-ly adding urgency to motivate myself to do things i wouldn't do otherwise and then i must pay the costs!?!?!!?

You've been conditioned so that task lists trigger you into a high-SNS state, expecting punishment of some kind. This isn't autonomously motivated, there probably isn't contemporaneous pressure towards it if you're not still in school, so you can just condition yourself back out.

By practicing calming down when you look at your todo list (via meditation, progressive muscle relaxation, slow deep breathing, just pausing) and then figuring out whether you want to do anything on the list right now.

Benefit to calming down before you start driving to the next task: you might decide the next task is dumb and skip it, saving time.

2 thoughts on “To-Do Stress

  1. Romeo Stevens

    When you simulate the counterfactual of doing the task two parts with opposing goals get activated. The part that thinks the task is a good idea and the part that thinks you shouldn't do it. Your to do list is the place these tasks accrue because the ones that don't have such a conflict get done relatively quickly vs the ones that build up.

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