How do I start automating my testing when it feels overwhelming?

Clicking through tests by hand feels safe because you can see it working. Automation feels overwhelming because it asks you to learn a new craft on top of the testing you already know. That gap is normal. Everyone who automates well started exactly where you are. Do not try to automate everything. Pick the one test you run most often, the boring one you repeat every release. Automate only that. Get it running once, by itself. When it passes on its own, you will have crossed the real barrier, which is proving to yourself that you can. The rest is just repeating that with different cases. So this week, choose that single repetitive test and automate nothing else. Small and finished beats big and abandoned. You are not building the whole machine today, you are laying one brick and seeing that it holds.