What To Do When The Anxiety of Starting Something New Is Paralyzing.
Massive action and learning from mistakes might be the best solution.
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Ever since I left the U.S. to live abroad in November 2019, I knew I wanted to live differently.
Working as an administrative assistant for more than two years left me feeling like an aimless zombie.
Almost two years later, rather than an aimless zombie, I am more of a paralyzed worrywart. As one of my friends often jokes; I’m a girl with ‘first world problems.’
At a time when almost eight billion people cover this earth, when a global pandemic has changed our life as we know it, and when everyone wants to be a freelancer or influencer, the feeling of being stuck is a growing pain for many of us.
Sound familiar?
Sitting in front of the laptop.
Reading articles and watching YouTube videos about what we want to do instead of doing.
Ending the day having done nothing tangible.
The actions we need to take to achieve our goals are so clear — yet we struggle day and day to do them.
But why?
Whether we want to lose weight, learn a new language, or are planning a move abroad (or to another city or state), overthinking is one of our biggest obstacles when it comes to going from point A to point B in any area of our life — point A being where we want to be, and point B that place we want to arrive at.
Getting out of your head and into action.
If this is your biggest problem, I’m right here with you.
Whenever I want to start something new, for example, setting up my profile for Upwork or sending a proposal to a potential client, the negative thoughts immediately flood my mind.
“This seems so difficult and time-consuming.”
“There are so many people already doing this.”
“Who would ever pay me to do this?”
“This will never work — why bother?”
Take a few seconds and think about that goal or project you’ve wanted to work on for the past few months.
What negative thoughts come to your mind?
This exercise is not about being intimidated by our thoughts. Rather, by learning to recognize them, we can better understand why we fail to take action on the things we say we want to accomplish.
These thoughts are a way of your brain protecting you.
Just like an overprotective parent, your brain would have you stay safe in the comfort of the known rather than attempt to discover what scary (or awesome) things are behind the menacing curtain of the unknown.
Regardless, even when anxiety might be something we are destined to deal with throughout life, there are a few things we can do to overcome this ‘paralysis from analysis.’
How can we move beyond this feeling of anxiety and start taking action?
Start Planning
There are moments when acting on a whim, for example, signing up for Bluehost to make your new website, or writing that article for Medium and publishing it on the same day, is the best thing we can do.
It will help us get out of our head and start with the first step.
Longer-term success and sustainability, however, are achieved through some planning.
Schedules, to-do lists, content planning, etc. Just search on YouTube and you’ll find countless planning tutorials.
Having a plan can help us get going along the right path if we’ve been stuck on the thinking stage for a while.
Imagine the engineer leading a construction without an architect’s plan. Or a teacher leading a class without a lesson plan.
They wouldn’t be efficient, would they?
When it comes to planning for something you have no idea how to start, begin by using the knowledge you already possess.
Let’s say you want to transition to a new career as an online English teacher (like I did in 2020).
You can make a list of tasks you know you will need to do when looking for any new job or opportunity:
- Researching opportunities online (or in-person)
- Brushing up your resume
- Learning more about what a person in that position — online English teachers, for example — do (or speaking to someone already working in the field).
These are logical steps anyone can come up with, even if they’ve never worked in their desired new career.
Completing the above will take only a few days, and it will set you closer to starting that new career, rather than just thinking about being one.
Soon enough, you learn about other things you need to become an online English teacher, things you didn’t know before you started doing the initial research:
- Getting some teaching training/certification
- Making an online intro video.
- Writing a captivating pitch for your potential students.
This process of brain dumping, researching, learning, and readjusting or improving our plans applies to most things we want to accomplish: Planning a vacation, getting in shape for the summer, learning to speak French, etc.
Of course, be wary of overplanning, as this can contribute further to your anxiety and paralysis.
Consistency is essential
Planning is only the beginning, and probably the easiest part of our journey to escape overthinking and achieve our goals.
Once we’ve gathered the information and determined we need to do A, B, C to get started, it’s time to do the work.
Schedule that time to work on your resume and prepare your cover letter.
Set up the time to visit a couple of gyms in your neighborhood.
Visit your local library and borrow that language learning audiobook.
In the beginning, this will be simple and exciting. And then, comes the desire for instant gratification.
If anyone is guilty of seeking instant gratification, that’s me.
I’m the kind of person who sends an email and checks every 10 or 20 minutes to check if they’ve replied.
This desire to see quick results from our efforts, however small these efforts are — is a craving that feeds our enthusiasm.
Weighing ourselves to see how many pounds we lost after only two days in the gym.
Checking our Medium account to see how many views that article we published in the last hour has gotten.
The truth we all know deep down is — it takes time to see the results of our actions.
How long it takes depends on many factors — our starting point, our efforts, luck, among other things.
The cliché about Rome not being built in one day is one we would be smart to keep close to heart.
Of course, even if we understand this logically, emotionally we can’t help but want quick results.
Think about the people you admire. Imagine if they had given up or allowed anxiety or perfectionism to get the better of them. What if they gave up because they didn’t get 100 followers in their first month? What if their book hadn’t been published because they gave up on their dream after the 10th rejection?
It would be a tremendous loss to the people who benefit from their work.
Maybe that person whose footsteps you hope to follow is not that far from where you are right now, or they were once we're in the position you currently find yourself in.
Give yourself a few weeks or months before you decide that something isn’t working for you.
It’s not about doing things without evaluating our work or improving on what we’ve been doing or putting out there.
In the example of the online English teacher — if you haven’t gotten any interviews after a few weeks of applying to online teaching jobs, get someone to review your resume, preferably someone who has experience in the field.
Or if you’re writing and publishing your work online, look through your past articles and see how you can improve them.
Effort always pays, and the combination of time, effort, reevaluation, and improvement is key.
Look for the small wins
On the flip side, putting ourselves out there and getting feedback on our work can also get us out of our heads and motivated to keep working on our goals.
When I started writing in Medium a couple of years ago, I had very low expectations as someone who only had academic writing experience.
Yet the moment one of my stories got curated (maybe the third or fourth one), I was stocked!
I started to believe I could get paid for writing.
Since then, I’ve only had a few more pieces curated or published in some publications. This says more about my lack of consistency than my potential, though.
The point is — if I had continued contemplating instead of setting down the time to write the stories, or if I had given up only after the first or second story, I would not have this proof that my work could be interesting enough to the Medium editors.
When we get started, any encouraging result or praise can be the thing that keeps us going.
By appreciating the small wins (the first 5 or 10 readers, or the first 2 or 3 pounds), our frustrations will lose their hold on us bit by bit.
Wash, rinse, and repeat
Achieving most things takes time, effort, learning, and repetition.
What frustrates us most is that we want to reap the rewards of work we haven’t accomplished, and our overthinking makes it difficult to start.
It’s like a catch-22. Well, sort of.
We want the amazing life that comes from achievement. But to get to that point, you must put in the daily work so that in the future you don’t have to — at least not as intensely.
It’s tough being a good writer when you don’t write every day.
It’s impossible to learn to love the gym until you push through the pain of the first couple of weeks or months of working out.
If you’re contemplating doing something you believe you would enjoy long-term or are at least willing to explore, doing the work will help you develop the skills to become that expert you think you’re so far away from being.
Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t.
Perhaps you’ve put the effort into one of your goals in the past — you did the work, allowed for time, and improved as much as you could.
But eventually — you didn’t succeed.
The reality is that many of our projects won’t succeed as we expect.
Even the most famous actors or singers have ‘flops.’
Just because we start something enthusiastically and put in the work, it doesn’t mean it will always work. Timing, luck, and circumstances are also part of the equation.
The best thing about trying things and failing at them is that we learn what not to do next time. We also pick up new learnings that will help us in our next venture.
Ultimately, most often than not, whenever we put in the work, we’re bound to be rewarded: We will gain new skills. We will put ourselves out there. We will learn what to do and what not to do.
And more importantly, we will have gained the confidence to keep pushing forward and working on ourselves and our goals.
There is no easier remedy to the anxiety of starting something new than action. Only time will tell where we end up.
