My Anxiety Made Me Automate Everything: An Unexpected Advantage

I have anxiety. The clinical kind that requires medication and therapy. For years, I thought it made me a worse entrepreneur. I was wrong.

My anxiety manifests as obsessive worry about things going wrong. Did I follow up with that lead? Did that payment go through? Is that deadline going to be missed? The questions never stop.

The turning point was realizing that my anxiety was right. Things do fall through cracks. Balls do get dropped. The worry was not irrational. It was realistic.

So I started eliminating the things to worry about. Every task that could be forgotten got automated. Every process that could fail got systematized. Every ball that could drop got caught by a system.

Lead follow-up worried me. So now it is automatic. Payment tracking worried me. So now alerts tell me instantly. Deadlines worried me. So now the system manages them.

The funny thing is, I still have anxiety. But now when the worry spiral starts, I can check the systems and confirm everything is handled. The reassurance is real because the automation is real.

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The companies that thrive are not those with the most technology, but those who apply technology most thoughtfully.

My business runs more reliably than any of my competitors. Not because I am more competent. Because my anxiety demanded I build systems that handle what I could not stop worrying about.

Other entrepreneurs mock me for over-systematizing. Then they lose clients to missed follow-ups that my systems would have caught. The anxiety tax pays dividends.

I am not recommending anxiety as a business strategy. But if you have it, channel it. Let the worry reveal what needs systematizing. Then build systems that answer the worry.

My therapist calls this productive worry. I call it turning a weakness into a competitive advantage. Whatever you call it, it works.