My therapist implied at one point that sleeping is a relatively common method of avoiding anxiety, so I guess my suggestion would be to force yourself to stay awake even when your body is trying to convince you that the correct response is to sleep, and see if it goes away after some amount of time, like half an hour.
EDIT: after reading PJEby’s comment below and thinking about what’s worked for me in the past (as opposed to what feels like it should work), this isn’t very good advice on its own. Better would be combining being awake with accepting the worst-case scenario or writing in a non-judgemental way about why you’re not getting work done
Other than that, the main technique that worked for me the last time I had a lot of work to do and not a lot of time to do it was to make a strict timetable of work (chapters, concepts, whatever) with specific deadlines and send that list of deadlines to someone whose opinion you hold in high esteem, with the agreement that you’ll show them your work as you complete it and they’ll nudge you if you go too far past a deadline. I didn’t end up keeping to my deadlines perfectly but I did stay on task much better than during the previous six months.
Oh and even if you work from home and can hypothetically work up to 12-15 hours a day, be aware that most people can only manage a peak productivity of around 4-6 hours per day, so don’t beat yourself up too much for the other 6 hours of eating/napping/running errands that you could hypothetically spend working instead.
Identfiying and alleviating the anxiety can be ridiculously hard if you don’t have experience with mind-hacking. Learning to put up with a certain amount of anxiety until it subsides naturally is a workable short-term solution if you have a lot of work to do and have trouble convincing yourself that it’s worth taking the time to stop working and do mind-hacking for mid- to long-term benefit.
Oh and even if you work from home and can hypothetically work up to 12-15 hours a day, be aware that most people can only manage a peak productivity of around 4-6 hours per day
I’ve mentioned this before, but I’m a fan of the G. H. Hardy threshold as well. The only time I’ve ever managed to exceed that was in the last days before my own Exam of Doom.
Ditto, there were a few days in the week before my thesis was due when I was achieving around eight hours of solid productive work, but the difference certainly wasn’t due to lack of trying in the previous weeks!
My therapist implied at one point that sleeping is a relatively common method of avoiding anxiety, so I guess my suggestion would be to force yourself to stay awake even when your body is trying to convince you that the correct response is to sleep, and see if it goes away after some amount of time, like half an hour.
EDIT: after reading PJEby’s comment below and thinking about what’s worked for me in the past (as opposed to what feels like it should work), this isn’t very good advice on its own. Better would be combining being awake with accepting the worst-case scenario or writing in a non-judgemental way about why you’re not getting work done
Other than that, the main technique that worked for me the last time I had a lot of work to do and not a lot of time to do it was to make a strict timetable of work (chapters, concepts, whatever) with specific deadlines and send that list of deadlines to someone whose opinion you hold in high esteem, with the agreement that you’ll show them your work as you complete it and they’ll nudge you if you go too far past a deadline. I didn’t end up keeping to my deadlines perfectly but I did stay on task much better than during the previous six months.
Oh and even if you work from home and can hypothetically work up to 12-15 hours a day, be aware that most people can only manage a peak productivity of around 4-6 hours per day, so don’t beat yourself up too much for the other 6 hours of eating/napping/running errands that you could hypothetically spend working instead.
So as to increase the anxiety? That doesn’t sound helpful, vs. identifying the nature of the anxiety and alleviating it.
Identfiying and alleviating the anxiety can be ridiculously hard if you don’t have experience with mind-hacking. Learning to put up with a certain amount of anxiety until it subsides naturally is a workable short-term solution if you have a lot of work to do and have trouble convincing yourself that it’s worth taking the time to stop working and do mind-hacking for mid- to long-term benefit.
I’ve mentioned this before, but I’m a fan of the G. H. Hardy threshold as well. The only time I’ve ever managed to exceed that was in the last days before my own Exam of Doom.
Ditto, there were a few days in the week before my thesis was due when I was achieving around eight hours of solid productive work, but the difference certainly wasn’t due to lack of trying in the previous weeks!