I'm So Anxious I Don't Get Anything Done

I often find myself not getting anything done because of overbearing anxiety. I have millions of ideas, but I never seem to get anything accomplished, because I start to second-guess the possible results. I start to wonder what the results will be before I even start, and, more often than not, the results that I come up with are negative.

Your mind is like a probabilities-processing computer

Or at least mine is. I will have a "brilliant" idea, then start thinking about what I need to do to get it done. For an example, I'll use this blog. I used to look for ways to make money online and otherwise, and I came upon the school of using the search engines to drive traffic to a website by targeting keywords and getting backlinks. This intrigued me, of course, because I thought that I could make money, not have to go outside and meet anyone, and I would have nobody telling me what to do. What a blessing for someone with social anxiety!

- I started assessing the situation:
First thing I needed to do was find keywords, so I looked around and found some, and also found possible sponsors that could pay me once my website started getting traffic. Didn't contact anyone, of course, I just looked and noted ones that I might contact in the future. After that, I made the blog, targeted a few keywords, and wrote an entry or two. I started realizing that it wouldn't happen overnight - that I was going to have to stick with this thing for a long time! That discouraged me, and I eventually stopped posting. I would think, "Wow, I really picked some highly competitive keywords, and I'll never be able to get any traffic for this stuff." My anxiety started getting the best of me.

The Confident Person Just Does It

What I should have been doing in the first place, was just DOING it! It doesn't matter if it sucks, or if the traffic doesn't roll in for a year. The point is, if I had have started writing on a daily basis, I would have a formidable blog by now, and one that would be a great place to backlink from. This idea of creating for the sake of creating eludes a lot of people with social anxiety, and keeps us from getting anything done.

Keeping your mind from thinking about the future will keep you closer to where you're supposed to be and what you should be doing - doing something! The more you sit and ruminate all the possibilities for failure, the less likely you will be to get out there and make something happen. Now, I still have serious anxiety issues, but for the past year, I've been trying to change my ridiculous thinking habits in order to be a little more productive. Here's what I do:

1) If I have an idea, I start working on it very quickly. Today, I started having some anxious feelings about not getting anything done, and then I thought, "Wait, I have a blog for that. I'll just make a post." And now I'm here.

2) I stop thinking about hyperbolic results. Sometimes it feels like the whole world is going to read my blog and just start laughing. This is what anxiety is all about. It is an exaggerated fear of something that probably won't happen. And even everyone in the world read the thing, not everyone would laugh. Some people may get some help!

3) I flip the negative to positive. If someone read it and thought I was stupid for writing this, I would view it as a reason to step my game up. I know that no one's perfect, and you can't please everyone. But, if enough people say you suck, maybe you should look into it. This is where the "that which does not kill me will make me stronger" saying comes from.

Less anxiety = more confidence!