The biggest barrier in our lives that stands between where we want to be or what we want to do is this four letter word called FEAR. The stories that you tell yourself as to why things don’t happen and a combination of your experiences in childhood and the “lessons” that you took away from various experiences in life can build up different kinds of fear that make it quite challenging to move forward in life.

Many of us struggle with procrastination and underlying that is FEAR. Fear of getting things done, fear of overwhelm, fear of failure, fear of success. As I’ve mentioned in this post on how our emotions drive procrastination, when you are always filled with fear no matter what you do, it can create waves of anxiety that can completely paralyse you when you are about to start anything in life. It could be as simple as just tidying your table to deciding where to live, fear can cripple your decision-making process.

As someone who goes through bouts of anxiety which can affect my progress in my goals, I’ve recently found a tip/solution that really helps to not only temporarily set aside your goal, but become really productive. This is courtesy of the Crappy Childhood Fairy, whose videos I sometimes watch on YouTube.

The solution is fairly straightforward:

1. You grab a notebook/open a Word Doc or whatever and just start listing the fears that you have now. You start each sentence with “I fear that…”. Examples – I fear that I will not be able to go to bed on time tonight. I fear that I will not be able to finish this assignment in 2 hours today. I fear that I will be too tired to stay awake throughout the work day. Get the drift? You just write whatever you have in your head down on better
2. Do this twice a day or whenever you want to.
3. Then just go about your day!

You will notice that there is something that just shifts in the way you go about your tasks after you’ve written down your fears and “put it into the Universe” so to speak.

By just writing it down, you’ve cleared your mind of those anxieties and fears that just go round and round, taking up space in your head. And there’s scientific backing for this, an exercise researchers term “expressive writing” and it helps to “offload” the worries from your brain, freeing it up to focus on other tasks and yes – to focus on getting the tasks you were worrying about done.

This exercise has been super effective for me, because the minute everything is dumped on paper, I am able to just go ahead and get whatever I was anxious about done, with no second thoughts.

Try this and tell me how it went for you!