I do have this feeling from time to time. Some stuff that’s helped me:
Simplify, simplify, simplify. Do your chores with as little effort as possible, per https://mindingourway.com/half-assing-it-with-everything-youve-got/. Buy stuff that does your work for you. Your goal is to complete your chores, not to do work; work is in service to the goal, not the goal itself.
Success by default. Make the easiest, lowest-energy, laziest way to do the thing also the right way. Have exactly one clothes hamper for dirty clothes. Buy clothes that don’t need ironing. Put decorative items on unused surfaces so you don’t put random junk on them.
Suggested to me by ACX commenters: random rewards. Pick something you like (chocolates, kisses from your wife, etc.) and set up a timer that goes off at a randomly selected interval which entitles you to that reward. The randomness might help your brain to associate chores with better feelings.
Make it satisfying: Power-washers for big jobs, steam cleaners, compressed air, powered dish brushes. There’s a lot of cleaning content on /r/oddlysatisfying for a reason.
This next one’s a lot more speculative, feel free to completely disregard. Seriously, I’m suggesting the following because it works for me, but my anxiety response might be way less than yours is and my method might be totally useless for that.
Anyway, it sounds like you have a strong anxiety response when either doing chores or thinking about them. I had a similar issue, and my strategy was flooding, exposure therapy turned up to eleven. Do not recommend.
My real suggestion is, when you feel these racing thoughts and fast breathing, is to stop the chore for a moment and stand there. Don’t try to distract yourself, because the focus is, for a moment, now on the anxiety response itself.
For me, anxiety is a series of waves of intense physical symptoms like fast heartbeat and breathlessness. There’s definitely a sense of “here it comes!” before each next wave. One thing that helped me was realizing that, while the anxiety response can be quite long-lived, each wave was only 10-15 seconds long. Noticing this gave me strength; if I make it through this wave, I’ll have a few minutes to work with the anxiety before the next. This may not be true for you, though.
You say that the endless nature of these chores terrifies you. In this moment of standing still, your goal is to dig a bit deeper, to try to ask “why does the fact that these chores are endless scare me so much?”
Possible answers could be:
Endless chores scare me because they’ll take up a huge chunk of my finite life.
Endless chores scare me because every time I finish them, I have to do them again soon; all my previous work has amounted to nothing.
Endless chores scare me because my thoughts race and my breathing speeds up.
Or something else entirely! It might take awhile to get a good answer, and you might have to think through many of them until one seems to fit.
All this might sound very familiar; you say you’re taking anxiety medication, but you may also have heard all this through therapy (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) or meditation. Again, my advice works for me but may not work for you! Please don’t feel bad if this doesn’t apply!
I do have this feeling from time to time. Some stuff that’s helped me:
Simplify, simplify, simplify. Do your chores with as little effort as possible, per https://mindingourway.com/half-assing-it-with-everything-youve-got/. Buy stuff that does your work for you. Your goal is to complete your chores, not to do work; work is in service to the goal, not the goal itself.
Success by default. Make the easiest, lowest-energy, laziest way to do the thing also the right way. Have exactly one clothes hamper for dirty clothes. Buy clothes that don’t need ironing. Put decorative items on unused surfaces so you don’t put random junk on them.
Suggested to me by ACX commenters: random rewards. Pick something you like (chocolates, kisses from your wife, etc.) and set up a timer that goes off at a randomly selected interval which entitles you to that reward. The randomness might help your brain to associate chores with better feelings.
Make it satisfying: Power-washers for big jobs, steam cleaners, compressed air, powered dish brushes. There’s a lot of cleaning content on /r/oddlysatisfying for a reason.
This next one’s a lot more speculative, feel free to completely disregard. Seriously, I’m suggesting the following because it works for me, but my anxiety response might be way less than yours is and my method might be totally useless for that.
Anyway, it sounds like you have a strong anxiety response when either doing chores or thinking about them. I had a similar issue, and my strategy was flooding, exposure therapy turned up to eleven. Do not recommend.
My real suggestion is, when you feel these racing thoughts and fast breathing, is to stop the chore for a moment and stand there. Don’t try to distract yourself, because the focus is, for a moment, now on the anxiety response itself.
For me, anxiety is a series of waves of intense physical symptoms like fast heartbeat and breathlessness. There’s definitely a sense of “here it comes!” before each next wave. One thing that helped me was realizing that, while the anxiety response can be quite long-lived, each wave was only 10-15 seconds long. Noticing this gave me strength; if I make it through this wave, I’ll have a few minutes to work with the anxiety before the next. This may not be true for you, though.
You say that the endless nature of these chores terrifies you. In this moment of standing still, your goal is to dig a bit deeper, to try to ask “why does the fact that these chores are endless scare me so much?”
Possible answers could be:
Endless chores scare me because they’ll take up a huge chunk of my finite life.
Endless chores scare me because every time I finish them, I have to do them again soon; all my previous work has amounted to nothing.
Endless chores scare me because my thoughts race and my breathing speeds up.
Or something else entirely! It might take awhile to get a good answer, and you might have to think through many of them until one seems to fit.
All this might sound very familiar; you say you’re taking anxiety medication, but you may also have heard all this through therapy (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) or meditation. Again, my advice works for me but may not work for you! Please don’t feel bad if this doesn’t apply!