Anki can feel like punishment

I think Anki does a pretty big disservice to itself by preaching the 'you must do all your reviews every day.' Even the concept of "amount of reviews to do" is IMO not the right way to think about things -- realistically, everything in your collection has some percentage of likelihood you know it. If you take some time off, that's ok, that aggregated % just goes down a bit. If you are motivated, great, maybe you push that number up pretty high with excess reviews so that you can chill in the future. Unfortunately, the current data modeling is all around "due dates." I think with FSRS we had an opportunity to change that, but perhaps folks decided that wasn't important.

Anyway, for me personally, things really opened up once I stopped thinking I needed to complete all reviews. Sure, I'll get through my backlog once in a while, but what I previously forced myself to do ~every day, now I only complete about once a month ~ quarter. If the backlog gets so large that it feels daunting, I'll go in and suspend swaths of cards that I no longer find compelling. But 'daunting' is relative -- my average backlog these days is around 1000-2000 cards, and that's OK.

I've been doing Anki for a decade and this model feels far more sustainable over the long term.

If you don't have a pressing deadline, stop thinking in terms of cards due and completing all of them.

Timebox instead.

Let's say you can afford an hour (for example) of time per day for Anki. Start the hour reviewing what you can before entering new cards. If you don't finish your reviews by the end of the hour, that's okay. They'll be waiting for you tomorrow.

Some days will be spent only reviewing, some days will have very little reviewing and you can spend more time creating new cards for new things you've learned.

It's natural autoregulation. By focusing on just being as consistent as you can, you can make progress without the anxiety.

Sure it’s tough, but still a great tool. Hard work is hard. Do you have any better ideas?

Maybe Anki just isn't for you. Not everything is or should be.

To be honest, I'm not familiar with Anki but I'd have to assume that there's a setting where you can change the number of review items.