“If I Don’t Do This NOW, I’ll Never Do This”: Unpacking the Urgency That Fuels Anxiety

There’s a belief that quietly drives so much of our anxiety: If I don’t do this now, I’ll never do it. This feeling of threat and urgency can feel so real, so true, that we don’t even question it. But it’s not the truth. And it’s costing you your peace and happiness—two things I deeply wish for you.

I’m Paulien, and I’m so glad you’re here. Sometimes, we hold onto beliefs that feel normal and familiar, not realizing they’re just beliefs. We don’t have to keep them. This is one of those beliefs, and it’s likely causing you to feel anxious all the time. Every time you notice something you “should” be doing, your fear brain jumps in: You have to do that now or else. You’ll never do it.

Where Does This Urgency Come From?

Let’s unpack this together. I want you to feel peaceful and happy, and to know that this is just a belief. When I released it, I was surprised by how much lighter I felt. That constant sense of urgency and threat from the future—if I don’t do this now, something bad will happen—was always there. But when I started to really look at it, I asked myself: Okay, but what if I never do it? The fear brain would answer: You’ll fail. You’ll never be good enough.

Going deeper, especially using tapping (the Emotional Freedom Technique), I discovered many reasons why I held onto this belief. One big reason is the fear of laziness—something many fearful avoidants struggle with. There’s this belief that if you’re lazy, nothing will ever come of you. If you give in to that “laziness,” you’ll never regroup, never get back on track, and just slide into “laziness land” forever. It’s dramatic, black-and-white, and fatalistic—classic cognitive distortions.

Reframing Laziness and Productivity

For so long, I was afraid of being lazy. But I started to reframe it as wanting to be efficient. I remember reading that Bill Gates likes to hire “lazy” people because they find the most efficient way to do things. That made me wonder—maybe there’s something good in laziness.

As I healed more, I realized that what we call “laziness” often comes from not being allowed to rest or take our time as children. Maybe your parents hurried you, couldn’t handle you resting, or pushed you to always be productive. For many fearful avoidants, there’s a lot of negative association and emotional charge around laziness. When you even consider not doing something now, that trigger gets activated. You feel anxious until you do the thing, because you feel like you’re doing something wrong by resting.

This leads to constantly pushing yourself, ignoring your body, your boundaries, and your needs. You feel you must be productive or useful to be valuable. But you are valuable even if you’re lying on the couch doing nothing. I don’t use the word “lazy” anymore, and I don’t feel any emotional charge around it. But I know society still attaches a lot of negativity to it, and that’s not fair. Often, someone labeled “lazy” simply has unmet needs—physical, emotional, or both. This often stems from childhood, from being a child whose needs weren’t met.

Why Does It Have to Be NOW?

So, why do you feel you have to do things now? Why not tomorrow, or next week? For fearful avoidants, there’s often a fear that in the future, you won’t have the energy or the same mindset, or that you’ll change your mind. I used to feel like I had to heal something immediately, or else I’d never get around to it. I worried that if I didn’t do it now, I’d lose the energy or motivation, or that I’d create more problems by not fixing it right away.

This fear of not having energy in the future is actually a sign that you’ve been pushing past your own boundaries for a long time. Your body is tired, and you’re not listening to its need for rest. Again, many fearful avoidants have negative associations with rest.

Building Trust With Your Future Self

At its core, this belief comes from not trusting yourself in the future. If you don’t trust your future self, you feel like you have to do everything now, cramming a million things into a single moment. But that’s not realistic. No one can do everything at once. Our bodies, minds, and the world just don’t work that way.

You have to allow yourself time. You have to allow yourself not to do everything right now. This is where the difference between perfectionism and process comes in. All fearful avoidants have perfectionistic tendencies. After working with over 3,000 people, I’ve never met a fearful avoidant who didn’t. Perfectionists want to do everything now because they already feel behind, like nothing is good enough. So everything has to be fixed immediately, just to reach “good enough.”

But that’s just perfectionism in disguise. Shifting from perfectionism to allowing things to be a process is a game changer. The all-or-nothing feeling—I have to do everything now or else—creates anxiety and pushes you to ignore your needs. But allowing things to unfold as a process makes everything lighter and more manageable.

You Are Valuable—Right Now

It’s such a simple phrase: If I don’t do this now, I’ll never do it. But there’s so much packed into it. You don’t have to do anything to be valuable. You don’t have to do it now, because everything is allowed to be a process. It’s normal and human for things to take time. You can identify something you want to work on and take weeks or months to do it—and that’s perfectly fine.

It’s simply not true that if you don’t do something now, you’ll never do it. Building a relationship with your future self is so important. Tell yourself: Even if I don’t have the energy now, I will take care of myself and do it in the future. If it’s important, I trust my future self to handle it. Even if you go through a long period of rest, you will regroup. You’ll likely find yourself in a more relaxed state, and it won’t take as much effort as you fear.

I used to cycle through working really hard, hitting a limit, judging myself harshly, and spiraling into shame because I wasn’t “productive.” That only made me more tired and anxious. But as I healed, I started allowing myself to rest and to work through the triggers that came up. After that, it became so much easier to do the things I wanted to do. Resistance makes everything harder and heavier. Allowing yourself to rest and addressing your triggers makes life lighter and more peaceful.

How to Release This Belief

There’s a lot you can do to change and release this belief. We’ve touched on some of the roots here. If you heal them—using techniques like tapping—it can feel easy and effortless to work on things. You’ll no longer feel like a tsunami of tasks is crashing over you. Instead, you’ll have a sense of peace, knowing you are valuable and good enough as you are, right now.

If you want to work on this and really address the roots of fearful avoidant attachment—and this belief in particular—that’s exactly what we do in the Healed and Happy program. My team and I personally guide you through the process. We start with a foundational pathway that everyone follows, because the roots of fearful avoidant attachment are often the same. Then, we help you choose the best next steps for your unique healing journey, because no two journeys are the same.

We love guiding you toward peace and joy, and helping you enjoy your life—because that’s absolutely possible, and maybe it’s how life was always meant to be.

You are valuable, just as you are. Everything else can be a process.