Often I end up closing the list and immediately turning to self-soothing. And because there’s no way to know in advance if a task on the list will give me anxiety, this often results in my list being not just unusable but unreadable, preventing me from doing or even remembering the non-anxiety tasks on the same list.
Don’t look at the list when anxious ;)
What I mean is I set up text to speech to read items scheduled on my todo list.
So if stuck on couch, I hear the todo read out loud.
This is 95% effective medicated, 10-60% unmedicated.
The other thing I found is the overwhelm comes from so many things.
Experiment with only letting 1, 3, 5 etc items be visible at a time. I sometimes go as far as saying top 3 are must do, 12 or however many remaining are optional.
Also also play your favorite video game sound like Mario coin when a todo is completed.