this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2026
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Been there. Got so bad that at one point I was seriously concerned I'd get fired over lack of productivity due to anxiety and depression. I was already in therapy for the anxiety (and some traumatic events that were then recent in my life) but had been resisting pharmaceuticals.
Two things helped me. One, I started keeping a weekly list of the hours I'd been mentally "on the clock" at least trying to work -- whether or not I actually got anything useful done -- along with a note of what I was trying to work on. When I got to 40 hours, I was done for the week. Off the clock. Unless I was doing something that I really wanted to get done or some emergency that really needed my attention came up, I was just done. Could do whatever the fuck I wanted with my time with no guilt. (If I did get called for a work emergency or was pursuing something particularly interesting, I logged those hours and deducted them from the next week's 40 hours.) I used a text file for this and wrote a little python script to tally my hours automatically -- do what works for you. This alone helped me a lot.
The second thing I did was I got on an SSRI. That reduced the amount of chest pain and severity of anxiety attacks I was having. After they took effect, I'd say I had more of "Oh fuck it, I'll just do it" attitude to things I'd put off from anxiety before. Didn't solve everything, mind you, and I still have a hard time getting myself to go outside regularly, but it's not the ordeal it was every time before, at least. It lowered the bar for doing things rather than removing it completely, basically.
If your problems persist, seek a therapist. A licensed, human therapist -- not an LLM! -- and tell them what's going on. My therapist strongly encouraged me to try medication after we'd been talking for a while, and eventually I took his advice and got a psychiatrist who prescribed the SSRIs.
Best of luck.