Learning to Work Without Anxiety

Two weeks ago, I started a production sprint that my AI planning partner kept responding to with a very polite, very skeptical: “that’s a lot.”

It was a lot. To get my meditation app’s beta ready for 250 women, I had to produce roughly 200 meditation recordings, build and schedule 196 emails and 196 texts (15,000 messages queued to go out over thirty day!!!) and get every file recorded, edited, named, and uploaded. In fourteen days.

I finished two days early.

But that’s not the part I can’t stop thinking about. The part I can’t stop thinking about is that I wasn’t exhausted.

If you watched this week’s video (it’s free, go watch it below, this post will make more sense), you know my normal operating mode: everything is urgent, and there’s an anxiety running underneath it all; some days a hum, some days a fire alarm. For almost a decade of building this company, I assumed that was simply the price of caring about my work. I think a lot of you have made the same deal with yourselves.

This sprint was an accidental experiment: what happens to the work if the urgency isn’t there? The answer: the work got done. Faster. Better. And best of all? Not burnt out.

Afterward, I sat down and reverse-engineered exactly what I did differently, because I refuse to let this be a fluke. It turned out to be a specific, repeatable sequence, some of it structural, some of it emotional, some of it so simple I’m almost embarrassed it took me so long to try it.

In the video I share the first shift: I subtracted before I added. I paused my podcast and Substack for two weeks before taking on the sprint, the first time in my life I made room for a big push instead of stacking it on top of everything else.

But the subtraction only created the space. What I did inside that space is what made the two weeks work, and that’s what this post is for. Below the paywall, I’ve laid out every step in order: how I structured the work so it never became a monster, the five-minute ritual I did every single day, what I did in the moments the anxiety showed up anyway (because it did, I’m a person), the question that saved me at least six hours, and the deeper work that I believe made all of it possible.

This is the sequence I will run on every big project from now on. If you’ve got something on your horizon that makes you preemptively tired just thinking about it — a launch, a job search, a move, a pivot — this is for you.