Anxiety as a distraction?

[uru]

I went before to a counsellor who I didn't particularly get on with. She suggested something though that made me wonder.

She floated the idea that my anxiety could be a way of procrastinating. That is, worrying about X Y or Z stopped me from thinking about the things I should've been thinking about.

I don't know if this is accurate or not but I just wondered if people had any thoughts on this?

[MyNameIsTerry]

Well, anxiety is certainly very good at keeping us in cycles of unhealthy behaviour. It's almost like the fight or flight has an inner version of it's own saying "you must keep him anxious so you stay alive!".

I would say it's certainly a problem I have had where I am worrying about something that is really stopping me working on the end goal. For instance, you can spend your life looking for cures when you could just get on with trying one out but you won't, you will get through reading/researching about it and then start looking at another one. This is just anxiety keeping you in that rut with some of it being fear of uncertainty in trying something new that could help because we fear what things look like on the other side too. So, I have a rule not to do much research on these things and if researching is stopping me actually working on it, it's an obsessive problem to stop.