I love this but then the thought of breaking down a task becomes a challenge and a task in itself to be broken down. Turtles...
In time, maybe the knowledge it is reducing anxiety will become its own reward!
Firstly, the act of breaking out a task can be difficult, if you haven't done the first step of actually documenting out the task.
And if you find the step of documenting out the task hard to do? There's actually a 0th step I didn't mention that psychologists suggest doing first, which is to document out WHY you need to do the task. I want to be clear here, the WHY isn't a "I have to do this or not get fired", its a reaffirmation of your VALUES that make doing the task important "I want to be a good engineer, and being a good engineer requires me to be able to analyze xyz".
Documenting out your values, will help motivate to at least document the problem.
Documenting the problem usually makes breaking out the tasks pretty easy.
Since I started doing this, I have actually come to LOVE breaking out a task into concrete steps. I put the reason why in another response here, but I think the reason why is itself two-fold. Firstly, its something I do for lots of tasks, both good and bad. As a result, the step of documenting out a problem doesn't actually feel associated with the specific ugh problem. Its a normal boilerplate step I have to do for lots of problems. As a result, when I'm breaking out the task into concrete steps, it doesn't actually feel like I'm working on the problem, and certainly not the "ugh" part of the problem. The second reason I love it, is because it feels like a way of making progress on the problem, without actually having to work on the problem. Does that make sense? Like I've somehow cheated the universe into letting me make progress, without actually having to do the part of the Ugh task that I don't like. Which is awesome.
And then once you've broken it out, the rules I've mentioned make getting through it much easier, though not perfect.
I haven't gotten around to trying medication as I recently lost my job in the US and had to move back to Canada but I have noticed that once I was diagnosed and able to put a label on the many behaviours I would/still do exhibit, I'm better able to take a step back and not fall as deep into the pit of despair and continue to make progress.
edit: I should also add, that in my case, the issue wasn't really that I wasn't capable of breaking down the tasks, rather, actually executing on doing so and progressing on those subtasks. What I realized was that I would end up picturing the time investment of the sum of all those subtasks, and any other child tasks those subtasks would end up forking off and then dread having to answer to someone as to why those things were going to take longer than expected. I've noticed that after losing my job and just working on personal projects, the dread aspect almost entirely dissapeared (now it's just boring tasks that I resist doing). But any deep work relating to my personal projects - I'm okay with new things popping up unexpectedly which end up taking me on a 2-3 day detour of extra work.