What you describe - that feeling when you think of doing those things, my personal experience has me classify it as overthinking becomes getting overwhelmed. And once I’m overwhelmed, I want to escape.

Keeping in mind coping mechanisms aren’t one size fits all, the coping mechanism that helped me is to write out the problem step by step. This forces me to think slower, and helps me get out of that recursion of thinking about the same things.

I’ve also found some success in the age of AI LLMs asking one to break it down as well.

An example would be the dentist. First I need to find one, I need to look at reviews, I need to make sure they accept my insurance, I need to make sure they’re reasonably close by. Alright, I compile a list of a few options, now the next part is the hard part: I have to actually call to get scheduled. But once I have it scheduled, my social anxiety is superceded by my desire to just get it over with. Sure I may feel that anxiety once I get close to the appointment, but I can cope with that - the real trick is by breaking down the process I didn’t get overwhelmed as quick, and if I did I had notes to come back to.

I’d recommend just getting a live version of a distribution that you don’t have to install, that way you can play around with it before committing.

I used to have a fair bit of imposter syndrome but now that I’ve been working with a proper team I’ve come too accept I have an aptitude for code and logic in general, alongside a fairly good abstract memory.

I’m not the best by any stretch of the imagination, but I’m a little more competent than the average software engineer, enough that it gets noticed.

I also got lucky and scored a job at 17 in the field (with no nepotism involved), not a great one but enough to look good on my resume, and have been working in the industry for just over a decade with no college.

Surprised Slice & Dice hasn’t been mentioned, it’s amazing. That and Dawncaster.

A useful tool is DarkPattern.games, which lists dark patterns in mobile games (such as micro transactions).