I spent three weeks not replying to an email. Every time I thought about it, my brain conjured an exhausting ordeal: I’d need to check several documents, verify some dates, write carefully considered paragraphs, maybe loop in another person. The whole thing felt like it would take at least an hour, maybe two. When I finally sat down to do it, the actual time elapsed was seven minutes.
This happens constantly, and we rarely notice the pattern. The gap between how hard we think something will be and how hard it actually is becomes a invisible tax on our lives, keeping us stuck in place while we psyche ourselves out over tasks that would take less time to complete than we spend dreading them.
The psychological weight we assign to tasks often has almost nothing to do with their actual difficulty. Our minds are remarkably skilled at constructing elaborate scenarios of everything that could go wrong, every complication that might arise, every bit of friction we might encounter. We imagine the worst-case version of the task, then treat that imagined version as reality, as if simply thinking about difficulty makes it so.
Take something like calling to sort out a billing error. In your head, it becomes an epic quest: you’ll be on hold forever, transferred between departments, forced to explain your situation multiple times to people who don’t care, possibly getting nowhere after an hour of frustration. So you put it off for weeks. But when you actually make the call, there’s a three-minute hold, one reasonably helpful person, and the whole thing gets resolved in twelve minutes. All that avoidance, all that mental energy spent on dread, for twelve minutes of mild inconvenience.
We do this with creative projects too. Writing a blog post feels like it will require carving out a perfect three-hour block, getting into exactly the right mental state, doing extensive research, and producing something brilliant on the first try. So we wait for that perfect moment that never comes. But actually sitting down and writing something rough and imperfect takes maybe forty minutes, and rough and imperfect turns out to be perfectly fine.
Part of what’s happening is that we’re conflating the emotional resistance to starting something with the actual effort required to do it. That heavy, dragging feeling isn’t the task being hard. It’s just the feeling of not wanting to do it, which is a completely different thing. But we experience that resistance as if it were a property of the task itself, like weight or size, rather than our own temporary emotional state.
Our brains also tend to lump all the surrounding anxiety and guilt about not having done something yet into the imagined difficulty of the task. You’ve been putting off that dentist appointment for six months, and now when you think about calling, you’re not just thinking about the thirty seconds it takes to schedule something. You’re thinking about all the avoidance, all the guilt, all the stories you’ve told yourself about why you haven’t done it yet. The psychological baggage weighs far more than the actual task.
There’s also a strange way we underestimate our own competence. We imagine ourselves struggling with things we’ve done successfully dozens of times before. You’ve filled out bureaucratic forms before and survived. You’ve had awkward conversations before and they turned out fine. You’ve started projects with no idea what you were doing and figured it out as you went. But somehow, the next instance of any of these things feels uniquely daunting, as if you’ve never done anything like it before.
Sometimes we’re even making ourselves busier than necessary in our imagination. We’ll think about organizing the garage as if it means sorting every single item, making complex decisions about what to keep, maybe building new storage solutions, definitely taking an entire weekend. But maybe organizing the garage just means spending twenty minutes moving the obvious junk to a donation pile and accepting that the rest is fine where it is. We get to decide what “organizing the garage” means, but we forget that part and imagine the most exhaustive version possible.
The irony is that the time and energy we spend avoiding tasks often dwarfs what we’d spend just doing them. That email you’ve been dreading becomes a background hum of anxiety that occupies mental space throughout your day. Every time you see it in your inbox, there’s a little hit of guilt and stress. Do this with enough tasks and you’re carrying around a substantial psychological burden made entirely of things you’ve imagined to be harder than they are.
Breaking this pattern doesn’t require willpower or motivation or waiting until you feel ready. It requires noticing the gap between imagination and reality, and then testing it. Not by forcing yourself through something genuinely difficult, but by picking something you’ve been avoiding and getting curious about what it actually takes. Time it, even. Watch how your brain was telling you a story that bore almost no resemblance to what actually happened.Once you start noticing this pattern, it becomes almost funny how reliably we do it. The thing you’ve been putting off all week takes eight minutes. The conversation you’ve been dreading is slightly awkward for thirty seconds and then fine. The project that felt overwhelming breaks down into a series of small, manageable steps the moment you actually start it.
None of this means that difficult things don’t exist or that we should dismiss the very real challenges we face. Some tasks genuinely are hard, time-consuming, and unpleasant. But we’ve gotten so used to our own mental inflation of difficulty that we’ve lost the ability to distinguish between things that are actually hard and things that just feel hard because we’ve been thinking about them wrong.
The solution isn’t to gaslight yourself into thinking everything is easy. It’s to approach tasks with curiosity rather than dread, to notice when you’re catastrophizing, and to test your assumptions about difficulty against reality. Most of the time, you’ll find that the mountain you’ve been staring at is actually just a small hill, and you’ve been standing at the bottom working yourself up for no reason.The work required to do most things is less than you think. The work required to keep avoiding them is almost always more.