Why is doing my self-assessment the thing I dread most?

You have not opened that tab yet. You know the one. It has been sitting in your bookmarks — or your dread — since roughly October, and every time it floats to the surface of your brain you do a very efficient little redirect. Make tea. Check Instagram. Suddenly become extremely interested in reorganising your desk.

This is not laziness. It is not disorganisation. And it is absolutely not a personality flaw you need to fix before you can sort your finances out. What is happening has a name, a mechanism, and — crucially — a very logical explanation.

Let’s talk about it.

The Thing You’re Dreading Isn’t the Tax Return

Here is the first thing worth knowing: the dread you feel right now, before you have looked at a single number, is almost certainly worse than anything you will find when you actually log in.

That is not a pep talk. That is a documented cognitive phenomenon.

Daniel Kahneman and colleagues identified something called affective forecasting — our tendency to predict how bad an experience will feel before it happens. We are, as it turns out, reliably terrible at this. We consistently overestimate how painful, how overwhelming, how catastrophic the emotional experience will be. And we let that inflated forecast drive our behaviour.

So your brain is not reacting to your tax return. It is reacting to an imagined version of your tax return — one that is, statistically speaking, significantly worse than reality.

The dread of doing the thing is almost always more painful than doing the thing. The problem is your brain cannot tell the difference.

This matters because avoidance feels rational in the moment. If you genuinely believe opening HMRC’s portal will be as bad as your nervous system is predicting, then of course you avoid it. Who walks willingly into something terrible?

Why Avoidance Makes the Dread Louder

Here is where it gets a bit circular, and a bit cruel.

Every time you avoid something, your brain logs that avoidance as evidence that the threat was real. You did not look. You survived. Correlation accepted. The next time the thought comes up, the alarm signal is slightly stronger — because your brain has now confirmed that this is a thing worth fleeing.

This is avoidance amplification, and it is one of the more frustrating quirks of human cognition. The protective behaviour that feels like relief in the short term is the same behaviour that makes the anxiety worse over the medium term.

Researchers in the money psychology space — Brad Klontz in particular, whose work on money scripts remains some of the most practically useful in the field — have consistently found that financial avoidance is not about money at all. It is about the emotions money has come to represent: shame, judgment, a sense of being behind, a fear of discovering something you cannot fix.

For self-employed people, this hits differently. Your income is variable. There is no employer smoothing things out and handling PAYE. Every number in your tax return is yours — which means every surprise feels personal.

Why Standard Advice Completely Misses the Point

The standard advice is: “Just do it. Block out an afternoon. Get your receipts together. It’s not that bad.”

This advice assumes the barrier is logistical. It is not.

If the barrier were logistical, you would have solved it already. You are a competent adult who runs a business. You can manage logistics.

The barrier is emotional. And emotional barriers do not respond to scheduling. They respond to safety.

What the standard advice also misses is something Galai and Sade identified in their research on the ostrich effect — the tendency to avoid looking at financial information when we expect it to be negative. Their finding was that people do not just avoid acting on bad news. They avoid receiving it. The avoidance happens at the point of information, not at the point of decision.

Which means telling someone to “just check their numbers” is a bit like telling someone with a fear of heights to “just look down.” Technically correct. Completely unhelpful.

What Is Actually Happening in Your Brain

When the thought of your self-assessment surfaces, your amygdala — the part of your brain that handles threat detection — does not distinguish between a sabre-toothed tiger and an HMRC login screen. It reads potential danger, unknown outcome, possible bad news, and it flags the whole thing as something to avoid.

Your prefrontal cortex, the part that knows perfectly well that filing a tax return is not actually life-threatening, gets somewhat overruled.

This is not weakness. This is architecture. It is the same architecture that kept your ancestors alive, repurposed for a world that now involves self-employed invoicing and Government Gateway passwords.

The problem is that your nervous system does not update itself based on logic alone. It updates based on experience. And if the only experience you have of approaching your self-assessment is the experience of dread — because you always stop before you get far enough to find out it is survivable — the dread stays.

One Small Thing That Actually Helps

I am not going to tell you to block out a Saturday and get it all done. That is not the move right now.

The move right now is what I call lowering the cost of looking.

Your brain has decided that looking = danger. The way to update that is to make looking feel genuinely low-stakes. Not fake low-stakes. Actually low-stakes.

Here is the specific action: open the HMRC self-assessment login page. Not the form. Not your records. Just the login page. Let it load. Close it if you want to.

That is it.

This sounds absurd. It is also backed by a decent amount of exposure-based research in anxiety treatment, adapted here for financial avoidance. The goal is not to file your return in one sitting. The goal is to teach your nervous system that approaching the thing does not result in catastrophe. That it is survivable. That you can move one step closer and still be okay.

Next session: log in. Not to do anything. Just to log in and see the dashboard.

The session after that: look at your previous submission, or your UTR, or whatever one neutral piece of information you can retrieve without judgment.

This is not procrastination repackaged. This is a deliberate, graduated reduction in the perceived threat. It is how you interrupt avoidance amplification without white-knuckling your way through something your nervous system is genuinely treating as dangerous.

Thaler and Sunstein’s work on choice architecture — the nudge framework — consistently shows that making a behaviour easier to initiate (lowering friction, removing the first obstacle) is more effective than increasing motivation. You do not need more willpower. You need a smaller first step.

The Part Nobody Talks About

The shame that comes with financial avoidance is often worse than the financial situation itself.

The gap between “where I should be” and “where I am” — whether that is about having everything organised, understanding the system, or just feeling like a functioning adult — is genuinely painful. And that gap widens the longer avoidance continues, which means the shame compounds in exactly the same way the dread does.

You are not behind because you are bad at this. You are behind because the system is genuinely confusing, you are probably doing three jobs at once inside your business, and nobody taught you any of this. That is not a character flaw. That is a circumstance.

The first step is not sorting your expenses. The first step is understanding what is actually driving the avoidance — because until that shifts, no amount of budgeting templates or deadline reminders will stick.

If you want to understand your specific relationship with money and why it shows up the way it does, the Money Beliefs Quiz is a useful place to start. It is built around the same behavioural frameworks I use with clients, and it takes about four minutes.

You might find it surprisingly illuminating.

— Joel