Having struggled with this for almost 20 years now, with little to show for it, I'd say "'unexplained reason' can actually be explained" seems to belong to the same category as "P != NP can actually be proven". Good luck and Godspeed.
Maybe I'm more of a clinical case, but for me, whatever I think the source of anxiety is in any given scenario, it's never that. I can eliminate potential sources one by one, dig in recursively, but it only provides very short-lived feelings of relief, lasting seconds to minutes, before anxiety restarts. To make matters worse, the more I spend time on such investigations, the more anxious I get about not working on the actual thing I wanted/was supposed to.
The most accurate model/explanation I have for this is: anxiety always comes, unconditionally; any "reason" behind it is just desperate post-hoc rationalization. The only reliable defense I know of is to be doing something so interesting or stimulating that it captures all of the brain's compute and starves the "anxiety process" entirely. Of course, that process will restart as soon as resources for it become available.
> For instance, if you have problems submitting your timesheets on time, it could be due to the fact that you're worried about putting too many hours on the budget. If you remove the worry about putting too many hours on the budget, then you might find yourself doing your timesheets on time.
I have problems submitting my timesheets on time. It's mostly because it's a boring, mind-dumbing chore, done using a GUI designed to prove that evil exists in this world. Like all modern timesheet tools, this one resists automation too. It's an annoyance that distracts me from the actual work I'm already behind on thanks to anxiety, and thus compounding the latter.
Yes, the task takes maybe 5 minutes. Would, if I could focus. But my focus window for mind-dumbingly boring tasks and routines is around 30 seconds; anything more than that requires ongoing, conscious effort. In reality, those 5 minutes usually turn into one hour, by the end of which I'm all dripping from stress-induced sweating.
I mean, I could've done my timesheets for the last two weeks four times over, in the time it took me to write this comment. Yet somehow, this comment is up, and the timesheets are not.
1) As I got used to finally being able to decide to do something, and then actually follow through without first having to win a mini-boss fight in my head, my perception of whole classes of tasks shifted - things I assumed were hard, or instinctively avoided, became things I knew I could do. This is good and how it should be, but what I didn't realize is that this state of things is still quite fragile. At some point I overloaded myself with responsibilities, and as I hit my limit, I started to slip up, which cracked my newfound trust in my own reliability - and things quickly spiraled down from there. Even though things got better, and they are better than they were before I was diagnosed, my self-image got seriously damaged. Even after half a year, I still haven't fully recovered.
2) I am a night person. Always have been. Whatever the reason underlying the reasons for this is, the meds didn't do much about it. What they did, however, is allow me to get away with much less sleep. This was super useful when my second daughter was born, as it made it easy for me to take the "first shift", feeding and changing the baby and letting my wife sleep more. Shift the meds schedule around to have one dose at 23:00, and I could do some work and care for the kid until 02:00, then sleep some 5 hours, and feel well-rested in the morning. Of course, this was not sustainable; there were two major bad consequences:
- "Sleep debt" kept accumulating, but since it was masked by my carefully-tuned med schedule, it took me way too long to notice I'm getting slower and less focused at everything.
- The whole experience broke my internal rhythm that told me when to go to sleep. And with overall improved executive functioning, it only became easier to stay up late.
3) It also took me a while to realize that the meds are "sticky". That is, they make it easy to stay on course - wherever that course lead. While they also make it easier to switch tasks, the improved focus makes it harder to notice that I should switch. As a result, whatever I'm doing when the meds kick in, is what I'll most likely continue to be doing for the next couple hours. Whether that's work, or writing HN comments.
3a) This "stickiness" also makes it easier to waste time going too deep into low-value tangential tasks. Like e.g. that time when I was working on a bug that turned out to be a regex issue - specifically, someone assembled a regex by concatenating some string constants, and didn't notice a subtle bug. As I fixed it, I decided to make sure such bugs don't happen again. I started writing some utility functions, and... few days later, I ended up committing a small library for making regexes via composition, which structurally prevented the class of bugs like the one I was originally fixing. Suffice it to say, those few days could've been better used on some other tasks. After that experience, I learned to pay attention to early signs of going too far off tangents. That's definitely a med problem - before diagnosis, my procrastination would stop me from pursuing such tangents too far.
All in all, I'm still adjusting. Many of the changes - both positive and negative - take a long time to become apparent.
I don't see it as stickiness, I see it more as effortlessness, because it's so easy to continue working on something, but I recognise the description. I'm dealing with it by exporting the "what am I doing?" question to text - in other words, being really really explicit about my thinking by writing it down. I have a log running in a Slack window that often has things like "ok, we're gonna take a step back, and think about the steps we need to take to accomplish the goal. First we X, then we Y, etc". I'm essentially rubber ducking my executive function.
For instance, if you have problems submitting your timesheets on time, it could be due to the fact that you're worried about putting too many hours on the budget. If you remove the worry about putting too many hours on the budget, then you might find yourself doing your timesheets on time.
The answer to your question lies in the "unexplained reason" which can actually be explained, that's the hard part.