How Task Completion Decreases Anxiety
Whether it's processing emotions or a quick task or a project, prioritizing completing a full cycle from beginning to end does wonders to decrease your stress levels and increase your confidence.
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Client: I am stressed and anxious at work most of the time. I try to start the day well, but by 10 am I find myself trying to do many things at once, getting pinged from all sides, and running from meeting to meeting (physically and mentally). I remind myself to breathe and eat well, but it doesn’t calm my anxiety. How can I destress and avoid burnout?
The vast majority of American workers are stressed and anxious. The American Psychological Association found that “77 percent of U.S. workers reported stress at work in the past month, with 57 percent reporting negative health effects as a result.” Anxiety is now the number one presenting issue among American workers, above relationship issues, family issues, addiction, and grief (Forbes, March 2024). Honestly, I don’t think you need the numbers — just look around you.
American workplace culture would like us to work hard (e.g. spend hours on our screens, sit at our desks for hours, eat quickly in 20 minutes while answering emails without talking to anyone) and then spend more money to compensate (e.g. pay more for organic veggies and fruits, buy fancy gym passes or equipment, hire a therapist out of pocket, pay for faster commute options, hire a babysitter to watch your kids while you do those things).
The work culture in places like Silicon Valley has become even more intense with the rise of “super ICs” (aka super ambitious, overworked people taking on 2.5 people’s jobs), companies doing layoffs and keeping scope yet not re-hiring, and competition cycles getting shorter and shorter.
Finally, while we may be out of the stresses of the COVID-19 pandemic, we cannot underestimate the psychological impact of global conflicts, racism, extreme political stances, mass shootings, climate-related disasters, and a turbulent economy.
With all of these external factors contributing to stress and anxiety, it’s critical to adopt tools that reduce stress. In today’s post, I will share one tried and true framework to reduce stress — task completion.
Today’s Post
Words: 1997 | Est. Reading Time: ~8 mins
Today we’re going to learn how to decrease the level of anxiety through task completion. We’ll cover in detail:
Why incomplete tasks create stress, leading to more incomplete tasks and more stress
How to break the cycle with a 3-min task every day
How to complete bigger tasks (paid)
How to fully process your emotions and “complete the task” (paid)
Incomplete Tasks Compounds Stress
When we start but don’t complete tasks, our brain has to store 10X the amount of information about that task than if we finished it. We attempt to remember what we have done, the current state, and what still needs to get done. We also start to worry about when we can pick it up again, whether we’ll still remember the context, and what factors might have changed at that point that renders what we’ve done so far no longer useful. That is a lot of information to remember for a single task.
Now let’s imagine we have 4 or 5 in-flight tasks. Now, it starts to become too much for your brain’s working memory to handle, and the stress that comes from trying to remember builds. Your brain will exhaust itself simply trying to remember all the in-progress tasks — instead of resting, it just constantly cycles through to-dos.
If you get interrupted multiple times working on a task, or you realize that not finishing one task means not being able to complete other tasks as well, the stress of everything potentially going awry begins to compound.
It’s a vicious cycle. The more tasks you have in flight, the more anxious you’ll become. If you’re interrupted a few times, the entire task also takes longer due to time context-switching. With higher anxiety and a longer time to complete a task, fewer tasks are completed. More tasks stay in flight, causing more stress.
Break the Vicious Cycle with a 3-minute Task
The way to break the vicious cycle is through completing tasks. When you complete tasks, you erase all the contextual information about the task from your working memory. This decreases your stress levels. You also get a nice dopamine hit that gives you more energy and confidence that you can get work done. This encourages you to work faster, and even free up some extra time to complete other tasks.
First, start small and give yourself every chance of success. For many people, that means kicking off your workday with completing a 3-minute task. Maybe it’s an email you need to respond to, an expense report to submit, a document to review, or a meeting to schedule. Maybe it’s responding to that teacher’s email, submitting a form for after-school activities, or folding the laundry.
Pick the task the night before, book 10 minutes on your calendar (yes for a 3-minute task), and unless there is a natural disaster (or a toddler screaming in your ear), complete the task.
Then do it again the next day. And the next day. Save a quick task to be your first task the next day. Don’t save more than one, because that adds too much to the “context-holding” part of your brain.
Starting your day with completing a task means starting your day with a nice dopamine hit. Write it down on a paper to-do list just to cross it off again.
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