You’re Not Overwhelmed — You’re Avoiding Something.
You open your laptop. Seventeen tabs. A to-do list that scrolled off the screen two weeks ago. A message you told yourself you’d reply to “when you had the right headspace”. A project that’s been “almost ready” for three weeks. You feel exhausted just looking at it — and you haven’t done a single thing yet.
So you close two tabs. Open a new one. Check your email. Make a coffee you don’t need. Come back. Stare again.
Here’s the thing: that feeling isn’t overwhelm. Overwhelm is when there is genuinely too much work for the time available. It’s logistical. It’s solvable with prioritisation, delegation, or a hard conversation about capacity.
What most of us call ‘overwhelm’ is something quieter, more specific, and much more uncomfortable to admit — it’s avoidance that has dressed itself up in busyness. It looks identical from the outside. It even feels identical from the inside. But the cure for overwhelm – more time, better systems, fewer tasks – does absolutely nothing for avoidance. Because avoidance isn’t about volume. It’s about one thing. Maybe two. That you haven’t been willing to look at directly.
The woman who spent eleven hours redesigning her invoice template.
Maria ran three businesses. A consulting practice, a small e-commerce brand, and a side project she kept meaning to shut down but hadn’t. When she came to her coach, she said she was drowning. Completely overwhelmed. She couldn’t keep up.
So they mapped her week. Every hour, written down.
What they found: Maria had spent eleven hours that week redesigning her invoice template. It was the third time she’d redesigned it that year. She’d also spent four hours restructuring her project management tool, two hours rewriting her email signature, and an entire afternoon doing research for a podcast episode she hadn’t committed to making.
The proposal to her single biggest potential client — a contract that would have changed the shape of her year — had been sitting in her drafts folder for six weeks. She’d opened it four times. Written nothing.
She wasn’t overwhelmed. She was terrified of rejection. And here’s the thing about invoice templates: they don’t reject you. They just sit there, looking tidy and safe, while the thing that actually matters stays undone.
This isn’t just you. It’s Margaret Atwood.
Margaret Atwood avoided writing The Handmaid’s Tale for three years.
She has said it directly — she thought the idea was “too batty” and kept trying to write a more normal novel instead. Even once she finally started, her daily routine involved puttering around in low-level dread until mounting anxiety finally drove her to sit down in the afternoon. She describes herself as a world-class procrastinator. The book she spent three years circling became one of the most important novels of the 20th century.
(Source: Inc. — Atwood on Adam Grant’s WorkLife podcast)
And Steven Pressfield. He didn’t publish his first novel until he was 52.
He spent his thirties and forties drifting – odd jobs, screenwriting work that went nowhere, decade after decade of not doing the thing. He has written and spoken at length about how that period wasn’t a circumstance or bad luck. It was what he calls ‘Resistance’ — his name for the force of fear, self-doubt, and avoidance that keeps people from their work. The book that finally broke through, The War of Art, was entirely about that resistance. Because by then it was the only subject honest enough to write.
(Source: Finding Mastery podcast) · (The War of Art)
If it can happen to them — people whose entire identity is built around doing creative work — it can happen to anyone. It is happening to you right now. The question is just whether you’re willing to name what you’re actually avoiding.
What your brain is actually doing.
When a task carries an emotional threat—fear of failure, fear of judgement, fear of a difficult conversation, fear that you’ll try and it won’t be good enough—your amygdala registers it as a danger. Not metaphorical danger. The actual threat response uses the same circuitry as the physical risk.
Your prefrontal cortex, which handles planning, execution, and starting things, partially disengages. You feel a genuine inability to begin. It’s not laziness. It’s not a weakness. Your nervous system is treating the email like a predator. And you don’t walk calmly toward predators.
So the brain does what it’s designed to do — it steers you away from the threat and toward something safer. Specifically, toward tasks that provide the dopamine hit of completion without any of the emotional exposure. Clearing your inbox. Reorganising your folders. Colour-coding your calendar. Making a very thorough and impressive plan for a thing you will never actually do.
You get the neurochemical reward of finishing something. Your body relaxes slightly. You feel, for a moment, like you’re on top of things. And the avoided task sits exactly where it was, gathering weight.
Research by psychologist Fuschia Sirois at the University of Sheffield found that 92% of procrastination is emotionally driven — not a time-management problem, not a productivity problem, not a discipline problem. The task isn’t too big or too complex. It’s too threatening. The solution isn’t a better to-do list app. It’s understanding what you’re protecting yourself from.
There’s also the Zeigarnik effect to contend with. Your brain keeps unfinished tasks in a kind of active background processing loop — quietly chewing on them even when you’re not consciously thinking about them. This is why the thing you avoid drains you even on days you don’t touch it. You’re not resting from it. You’re carrying it everywhere. The mental load of not doing something is almost always heavier than the mental load of doing it.
The pattern most people don’t recognise.
Avoidance disguised as overwhelm has a particular texture. See if any of this is familiar.
You have a long to-do list, but one or two items never seem to move. Everything around them gets done. They stay.
You feel most busy and most productive on days when you’ve done a lot of things – just not the things that actually matter. The day ends fully. The needle hasn’t moved.
When you sit down to do the avoided task, you suddenly remember three other things that need to be done first. The conditions are never quite right. You need more information. You need more time. You need a better mood. You’ll do it tomorrow when you’re fresher.
You have thought about the avoided task more than almost anything else in your life. You have mentally rehearsed it, argued with it, planned it, and dreaded it. You have done everything except start it.
This is not a productivity problem. This is an emotional problem wearing productivity’s clothes.
What you’re actually afraid of.
The avoided task is almost always protecting you from one of a small number of fears. It’s worth naming them, because once named, they lose about half their power.
Fear of failure. If you don’t finish — or don’t start — you can’t be judged on the outcome. The thing exists in potential, where it’s still perfect, still possible, still yours. Starting makes it real. Real things can disappoint.
Fear of rejection. The proposal, the pitch, the message to the person you haven’t spoken to in a year. As long as it’s unsent, the answer isn’t no. You’re protecting yourself from a no that may never come — by guaranteeing a ‘nothing’ that definitely will.
Fear of confrontation. The conversation you need to have with someone on your team. The boundary you need to set. The thing you agreed to that you shouldn’t have agreed to. Easier to be busy than to have the moment.
Fear of inadequacy. The project you said yes to and secretly suspect you can’t deliver. The creative work that will reveal what you actually are. The thing that, if done badly, would confirm the thing you most fear about yourself.
None of these is rational. All of them are completely human. And all of them run quietly in the background, shaping your day, while you tell yourself you’re just very busy.
What to actually do.
01. Audit by dread, not urgency. Go through your list right now – I’m not looking for what’s most important or most time-sensitive. Look for what makes your chest tighten when you read it. What do you keep skipping over? What has been on the list longer than anything else? That’s your answer. You already know what it is. You’ve been carefully not looking directly at it.
02. Ask the honest question. Not “why haven’t I done this?” — that road leads to shame spirals and self-criticism that make starting even harder. Instead, ask: If I did this today, what am I afraid would happen? Write it down. Be specific. “I’m afraid they’ll say no.” “I’m afraid it won’t be good enough.” “I’m afraid of what it means if I try and it doesn’t work.” The answer is usually more honest and more specific than you expect — and seeing it written down makes it smaller.
03. Do two minutes. Not the whole thing. The amygdala threat response is triggered almost entirely by anticipation — the moment before you begin. Once you actually start, the threat signal drops sharply. The task becomes concrete rather than imagined, and concrete things are dramatically less frightening than imagined ones. So don’t commit to finishing. Don’t commit to doing it well. Commit to two minutes. Open the document. Write the first sentence of the email, even if it’s terrible. Put one item on the page. That’s it. Most of the time, you’ll keep going. But even if you don’t, you’ve broken the seal.
04. Stop rewarding the decoys. Start noticing when you’re doing productive-feeling busywork — not to beat yourself up about it, just to name it as it’s happening. I’m reorganising this spreadsheet instead of making the call. I’m reading articles about the project instead of starting it. The noticing is the intervention. You can’t unsee it once you’ve seen it, and once you’ve named the decoy for what it is, it becomes a lot harder to feel satisfied by it.
05. Tell someone. Avoidance thrives in privacy. The avoided task stays avoided partly because no one else knows it exists. Telling one person — a friend, a colleague, a coach, or a stranger on the internet — “I’ve been avoiding this thing for weeks, and I’m going to do two minutes of it today” is surprisingly powerful. It makes the avoidance visible. It makes the commitment real. It introduces a small amount of accountability that your nervous system responds to more than any app or system ever will.
The to-do list isn’t what’s crushing you. One item on it — maybe two — carries real emotional weight. And everything else has quietly piled up around those items as insulation. As noise. As somewhere to be that isn’t there.
Margaret Atwood circled her most important book for three years. Steven Pressfield spent two decades avoiding his. You’ve been avoiding yours for how long now?
Find the item. Write down what you’re afraid of. Do two minutes of it today.
You’re not behind. You’re not broken. You’re not uniquely undisciplined or lacking in some quality that other people have. You’re human, you’re protecting yourself from something that feels threatening, and the protection has started to cost more than the threat ever would have.
The hard thing is almost never as bad as the waiting.
