The related article in the sidebar is moderately insightful: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200121-why-procrastination-is-about-managing-emotions-not-t

The related article in the sidebar is moderately insightful: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200121-why-procrastination-is-about-managing-emotions-not-time https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200121-why-procrastin... I've been working to overcome burnout that took me out of the game a year ago. What it basically came down to is that midlife crisis feelings had come to dominate my psyche. I found myself asking "what's the point?" about basic tasks that must be done. The start of a cure turned out to be separating a task into writing the todo list for it and then doing it afterwards. The next evolution of that is to also separate your evaluation of the work from the work itself, so that you don't wallow in critical feelings as you work. Try to be zenful and just concentrate on the now. Basically it all comes down to anxiety management. So for example, say you are cleaning and you get a text message to deal with an issue. I normally would make a mental note to remember to do it, since I lean towards intellectual pursuits. But it's better to add the item to the top of your todo list and stop thinking about it or the fear of forgetting it. Better yet, pause cleaning (since it's low-priority) and deal with the issue immediately. I've found that mechanizing the thought processes that I had taken for granted until they failed me boosted my mood. If you think of it as a scale from 0 to 10, our default with stress is to hover below a 5 (say 3). It takes effort to get above 5. But there is a stable orbit around 7 if you can maintain it for a few weeks. I think this is why people with a positive disposition have so much difficulty understanding people with anxiety, because physically they actually feel similar, it's just that our subjective interpretation of them are different: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcGyVTAoXEU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcGyVTAoXEU Edit: the above is a TED talk about changing this subjective reaction to stress. Edit #2: I accidentally shared the wrong video, I was thinking of this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rRgElTeIqE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rRgElTeIqE