Sometimes it’s best to just leave anxious people out of making decisions.
I mean this with as much kindness as possible.
As someone who suffers from extreme anxiety, it’s just best to exclude neurotic energy from major decision making. That’s why I try to jump in and influence my mom’s life as much as possible from a distance. She has to be one of the most anxious and neurotic humans I’ve ever known in my entire life. She is obsessed with things like energy savings and stretching her home appliance lifespans for decades. As such, she has a lot of hang ups when it comes to servicing or upgrading her decrepit old central heating and cooling system. The last time I went to visit, the indoor air quality at her house was awful. I could barely feel any air conditioning coming through the air vents, and asks at one point if she was operating the cooling system at all. She told me that the cooling system was running on full power because she knew I was coming. That’s when I knew something had to be done. Clearly, her air conditioning system was not functioning properly. She was wasting a ton of energy and had no idea. When she left the house to go grocery shopping, I called out a central heating and cooling technician and snuck him into the basement. By the time I left from my visit, she had vastly improved indoor air quality, indoor air handling appliances, and absolutely no idea that I had covered the HVAC bill.