Well, pay attention to what is anxiety, scientifically speaking. I myself made the common mistake to mix up stress with anxiety and, as I wasn’t really stressed, I thought I wasn’t anxious.
Anxiety is very, very sneaky and it’s common to have it without noticing it. Stress is about something : there’s a danger, a fear, a deadline, whatever.
Anxiety is more about inconscient thoughts, it’s more distant, barely observable, it’s about how you feel about yourself, your history and moreover your future.
In the case of procrastination they have basically opposite effects : a good amount of stress will make you progress and achieve before a deadline. Anxiety, on the contrary, looks like a mechanism which removes this useful stress and instead just add a coin in the uncertainty of the future. You don’t stress anymore about today so you procrastinate / avoid the task but now you have more anxiety : you have added uncertainty and insecurity in your brain : another undone task and you’ll probably never know if and how much it will cost you.
My pet theory is that this happens when your brain got somehow too much stress for low reward in the past and now learned to avoid stress by avoiding doing things with uncertain rewards. Instead you build up anxiety which is basically taking stressful things and hiding them under a carpet because well, not doing $thing will not kill you and you learned the hard way that doing things isn’t worth it.
You have to do something, the brain gives a quick look under the carpet, sees all the hidden shit mountain of all the past failures and says "oh we’d better check what’s new on YouTube".
Anxiety is very, very sneaky and it’s common to have it without noticing it. Stress is about something : there’s a danger, a fear, a deadline, whatever.
Anxiety is more about inconscient thoughts, it’s more distant, barely observable, it’s about how you feel about yourself, your history and moreover your future.
In the case of procrastination they have basically opposite effects : a good amount of stress will make you progress and achieve before a deadline. Anxiety, on the contrary, looks like a mechanism which removes this useful stress and instead just add a coin in the uncertainty of the future. You don’t stress anymore about today so you procrastinate / avoid the task but now you have more anxiety : you have added uncertainty and insecurity in your brain : another undone task and you’ll probably never know if and how much it will cost you.
My pet theory is that this happens when your brain got somehow too much stress for low reward in the past and now learned to avoid stress by avoiding doing things with uncertain rewards. Instead you build up anxiety which is basically taking stressful things and hiding them under a carpet because well, not doing $thing will not kill you and you learned the hard way that doing things isn’t worth it.
You have to do something, the brain gives a quick look under the carpet, sees all the hidden shit mountain of all the past failures and says "oh we’d better check what’s new on YouTube".