Are Your To-Do Lists Torturing You?

The danger of anticipatory stress and how to overcome it

Anna Katharina Schaffner | Psychology Today

A shorter version of this article was originally published on 26 January 2025 on Psychology Today/The Art of Self-Improvement

Many of my coaching clients who struggle with exhaustion are almost never able truly to relax, switch off, and enjoy the time when they aren’t working. They try. But even when they do nothing their moments of rest are not restful. Why? Because they constantly think about their to-do lists. Even when they want to relax, their minds remain focused on work-tasks or life-admin that they haven’t done and know they must do at some point in the future.

Lack-Thinking and the Done-List Cure

This is problematic for various reasons. First, and most obviously, thinking about work erodes the relaxation response and destroys presence. By dwelling in the future and imagining unpleasant tasks, we ruin our capacity to be in the here and now and to recuperate from our exertions. Secondly, when we think non-stop about our to-do-lists we ignore what we have done that day, and instead centre our attention on our perceived failings and general behindness with everything. The attentional focus on what we haven'tdone gives us a skewed picture of our self-efficacy. Even if we worked hard all day long, we make ourselves feel like slackers, skivers, or shirkers.

In my practice, I regularly hear stories about people working in highly stressful, full-on jobs, renovating houses, having young families, and trying to care for aging relatives all at the same time. They literally don’t have a second to themselves all day long. Late in the evening, completely run off their feet, they notice with great disappointment that they still haven’t booked their summer holiday, failed to complete an outstanding insurance claim, missed the deadline to register for their annual health check-up, and have once again not managed to defrost their precariously iced-up freezer. They have also not managed to work on their book project – again! – and to brush up on their Japanese. They blame themselves greatly for what they haven't done and feel no sense of satisfaction with what they have done instead.

Recently, I was particularly saddened to hear the story of a junior doctor. She told me that she regularly sees 80 patients each day – way more than anyone should see, and particularly someone in training. She barely allows herself a lunch-break, and always comes home completely shattered in the evening after her long shifts. But instead of feeling a sense of accomplishment – for, objectively speaking, it is nothing short but heroic to see so many patients each day, every day – she feels terrible. She thinks of the 80+ patients she hasn’t seen, and who are also waiting for urgent treatments. She feels like a failure because she thinks only about whom she hasn’t managed to help. She also notes that she is massively behind with her studies, and adds bitter self-recriminations and inner noise to her physical depletion.

This may be an extreme example – and a classic case of good, caring people taking personal responsibility for what are clearly systemic failures beyond their control. But, in fact, many of us think like that. By the end of the day, we only notice the tasks that are still on our to-do lists, together with all the new ones that have popped up.

A great antidote to this kind of deficiency- and failure-focused thinking is creating a “done” list. Play with it. Try writing down all the things you have accomplished at the end of one of your days, and see whether it makes a difference. Celebrate your wins and accomplishments. Give yourself some credit.

The Trouble with Anticipatory Stress

Another reason why constantly thinking about our to-do lists is dangerous is because it causes anticipatory stress. Anticipatory stress generates physical and emotional symptoms that are the same as those caused by actual stress (Gaab, Rohleder, Nater, & Ehlert, 2005; Waugh, Panage, Mendes, & Gotlib, 2010). Just thinking about stressful tasks in the future or our workload makes us experience the same stress responses as doing these tasks. These responses include increased cortisol levels and affective and cardiovascular reactions (Feldman, Cohen, Hamrick, & Lepore, 2004; Kirschbaum, Pirke, & Hellhammer, 1993). That means that we can and often do cognitively activate our stress – we can think ourselves into a highly stressed physical and emotional state (Meurs & Perrew, 2011; Ursin & Eriksen, 2004).

Worrying vs Planning

Anne Casper and Sabine Sonnentag (2020) have found that workload anticipation and worrying about work in the evening makes us wake up more exhausted the next day. In other words, worrying about our to-do lists can result in anticipatory fatigue – it consumes and depletes our energy and motivation even before we engage in the tasks we worry about.

Worrying is a maladaptive coping mechanism. Casper and Sonnentag define it as a “future-oriented repetitive thought process accompanied by negative affect that involves recurring thoughts about possible threats, risks, and uncertainties associated with future events” (220). In other words, worrying is a largely pointless and energetically very costly activity: It involves highly repetitive thoughts that keep looping around the same problem, and that also, crucially, remain in the problem space. When we worry, we do not solve anything. We just ruminate, catastrophise, and imagine unmanageable effort and bad outcomes.

A much more productive way of using our cognitive and emotional energy is planning: actively visualizing concrete action steps we will take in the near future to complete tasks or address problems. Casper and Sonnentag found that, unlike worrying, work-related planning during the evening may energize employees “and contribute to next-morning vigour.” If we plan and plot action steps, we may feel energized and motivated the next morning. If, however, we only worry about our tasks and workloads in the evening, without adding an action-oriented, problem-solving dimension, it completely drains us, and we wake up exhausted.

What Can We Do?

There are a couple of learnings we can take from this research. First of all, Casper and Sonnentag’s study serves as a reminder about the all-powerful mind-body connection. Just imagining certain situations can cause the same physiological and affective reactions as actually being in those situations. We know that already, of course. Someone who fears public speaking, for example, will experience the symptoms of fear by imagining giving a wedding or birthday speech. Someone who fears heights will experience dizziness by visualizing themselves at the top of a steep tower with no railings. Someone who is hungry will salivate when thinking about a delicious meal. Someone in lust or in love will experience arousal when they think of the object of their desire. However, in the context of work- or task-related stress, it is well worth remembering that our to-do-list thoughts can inflict active physical and emotional harm. It therefore matters that we try to control our task-list-related ruminations. But how?

The second learning we can take from Casper and Sonnentag’s research is the difference between worrying and planning. When we find ourselves worrying about our to-dos, we can experiment with going into planning mode instead. We may, for example, write down a couple of actions we are planning to take the next day. We can also remember the Stoic circle of control technique and reflect on which parts of the work-related worries are within our control, and which are not. Then we can focus our attention and energy more narrowly on what we can control, and think of specific behaviours and actions that might help us feel more in control.

The perhaps most important question, though, is how we can actively let go of our to-do-list ruminations. As so many things, this sounds easy, perhaps even banal, in theory, and yet is really hard to translate into practice. It is a classic case of “common sense – uncommon practice.” When our mind is like a dog with a bone, it is far from easy to convince it to let go of certain thoughts. Simply acknowledging that we are stuck and ruminating is the first step. We may say to ourselves, “I notice that I am ruminating about my to-do-lists.” We can acknowledge that we are experiencing worry, stress, and anxiety in that moment. We can accept that our mind is trying to take care of us, but is choosing the wrong strategy.

We can try to change our state and calm down our autonomic nervous system. Guided audio trances are a great way of detaching from worrying thoughts. Many people find they are highly effective tools for deep relaxation. Unlike meditation, which can be hard when our thoughts are racing, they require only that we do nothing but listen, which we can do in any state. You can find a range of audio trances specifically created to help with exhaustion- and stress-related challenges on my website, including one called Let Go of Work Stress.

Finally, we can seek actively to distract ourselves by doing something that requires our full physical and mental presence, such as exercise. We can also always seek company and try to focus our attention outwards, on other people.

Image: Anna Katharina Schaffner