Why do I freeze up instead of starting the work?

You sit down to work and your chest tightens. You open the document, then close it. You check email instead, or clean your desk, or tell yourself you'll start after lunch. The deadline moves closer. The work does not move at all. This is not laziness. You are rehearsing failure before it happens, and the rehearsal feels like danger. Your mind treats an imagined meeting, an imagined verdict, as if it were already real. It is not real. It has not happened. What is in your power: the next ten minutes, the next sentence, the next small action. What is not in your power: how others will judge it, whether it will be perfect, what the outcome will be. Stop guarding the second thing. Start the first.