TL;DR The more I take action, the less anxious I feel.
I am currently trying to get into a proper design career, and I am finding it terrifying because I am always afraid of doing new things. I like staying on the beaten path and doing things I am familiar with. With new things there is a very good possibility that you end up failing, or worse, looking like a fool.
But this year I am trying more and more to go after the things that I find interesting, to try stuff. With this attempt to make a career out of designing, I feel so much anxiety, more than anything else I've done this year. I worry about everything, I worry that I will fail eventually. I worry that whatever I am working on right now is crap. I worry that I will embarrass myself, and so on.
But I find that I feel a lot more anxious when I'm doing nothing. I feel a lot more anxious when I'm on my bed, tossing and turning, and dreaming up all the different ways I could fail. My anxiety is at a fever pitch when I'm away from the work itself and doing anything and everything except working. And what's so interesting is that this anxiety makes it harder to do anything. You worry that you will fail —> so you don't work —> then you worry more that you will fail and that you aren't working —> so you don't work —> and on and on.
These days I find that all it takes to quiet those voices is to do some work. That's all. Whenever I open my laptop, and break out Figma (or whatever tool is relevant to the work at hand), and begin to do the work, step by agonising step, the voice of anxiety fades away. Maybe it's because I'm too focused on the task at hand to worry about anything else, but whatever the reason, I find that if I put in a certain amount of work in a day, I find it a lot more difficult to be in that constant anxiety. It's so amazing, literally. The hack is to do something, just do something.
I now regret every idle moment I spent worrying instead of working. That's precious time I will never get back, but not to worry, I hope to do better at navigating this in the future. And you can too.
Do something today. Whatever it is, try, do something.
