It’s a bit hard to give concrete advice without knowing more but it sounds like the anxiety is linked to a fear of failure?
You should try to weigh the pros and cons of your options as best you can, of course. You should also try to break down your tasks into achieveable goals as much as possible so as to build up your confidence as you achieve them and lessen your anxiety.
But at a certain point, you can only know and project so much about your options unless you actually try them. When you choose something, dont quit when you start to doubt if theres a better way. You aren’t actually equipped to make that evaluation until you have tried and succeeded/failed with your current path. Its a good thing to fail, it teaches you a lot going forward.
I think the real problem you need to address is your difficulty accepting risk, which i suspect is tied to a fear of failure. Start trying to convince yourself that mistakes are good things.
When choosing a path, plan benchmarks where you can step back and evaluate concrete work up until that point. Only consider changing your path if you have concrete evidence to prove that you’re going astray. And ask others for their opinions along the way, don’t do it all alone
There’s a lot of mental gymnastics that are stopping the OP from attacking the problem. Fear of failure, perfectionism, and putting ideas on a pedestal are constructs of the ego.
The ego is most likely framing the entire situation as ‘What is this grand pivot that, if executed properly, will change everything?’. Very pretentious, don’t let your ego frame things in that manner.
Makes me think about "getting ahead of oneself" - e.g. thinking, worrying, too much about the future.
“Being where you are is bliss, thinking about where you want to be is suffering.”
Hence why meditation to observe your thoughts and observe if you react to thoughts is a useful practice for training yourself to be more in the present moment - because there's no gift like the present!
Sure, it’s a standard defense mechanism. The particular mental model you are describing, the ‘living in the future’ model, is often used by people on extreme ends to justify all types of bad behavior in the present. They begin to rationalize simple things like procrastinating, because ‘it won’t be like this in the future, so I am absolved of my actions in the present’.
The OP is effectively saying ‘I don’t have to do any work, because in the future I will have the perfect idea that will be worth working on’.
That’s the root issue that needs to be tackled, plenty of other posters have given frameworks for doing so (breaking things down, etc).
But we must keep the root cause in mind, because it will always pop up in other scenarios, e.g ‘It’s okay if I never followed up with this girl/guy, because one day I’ll meet a better girl/guy’, or, ‘I don’t have to care too much about this person, because he/she won’t be around in a few months’, etc.
Fear of failure which maybe is tied to "shoulds, wouldas, couldas" - 'I "should" have completed X' and if haven't completed it will instil a thinking pattern of guilt and shame, beating yourself up; solution is to catch yourself if you say "should", perhaps first having someone else point it out to you in conversation so you can start catching yourself, and then replacing "should" with say "need." It's subtle but it can be dramatic.
>> When you choose something, dont quit when you start to doubt if theres a better way. You aren’t actually equipped to make that evaluation until you have tried and succeeded/failed with your current path.
This is something I learned from my former boss (director of research): Don't try and evaluate your experiment before it's finished. See it through before checking your hypothesis.
You should try to weigh the pros and cons of your options as best you can, of course. You should also try to break down your tasks into achieveable goals as much as possible so as to build up your confidence as you achieve them and lessen your anxiety.
But at a certain point, you can only know and project so much about your options unless you actually try them. When you choose something, dont quit when you start to doubt if theres a better way. You aren’t actually equipped to make that evaluation until you have tried and succeeded/failed with your current path. Its a good thing to fail, it teaches you a lot going forward.
I think the real problem you need to address is your difficulty accepting risk, which i suspect is tied to a fear of failure. Start trying to convince yourself that mistakes are good things.
When choosing a path, plan benchmarks where you can step back and evaluate concrete work up until that point. Only consider changing your path if you have concrete evidence to prove that you’re going astray. And ask others for their opinions along the way, don’t do it all alone
Good luck