First off, let's make a distinction between being nervous and being anxious, at least for the purpose of this discussion. Nerves, the jitters, the 'butterflies' -- these terms describe the mixed ball of fear-excitement that's usually rooted in the belly and sends tendrils of electricity out under the skin. Usually it's in response to a new environment, or at facing an unknown element. You may be told what to expect, but you don't know for sure, and so you still get 'first-day nerves' or "What the hell is this now?" playing in your mental background noise.

Anxiety is a pervasive, niggling vague ball of tangled fears, key words being 'pervasive' and 'vague'. Picture anxiety as a disgusting little mess plugging your mental shower drain. Sometimes it lets your thoughts drain a bit, but never all the way. Eventually, with everything going on in your noggin backing up, you can't relieve the pressure, and it builds up to affect what you do and how you do it. You can't settle on any one thing, and this frenetic mental activity drains your attention, your energy and your vitality.

In what ways does anxiety affect your decision-making capacity?

• Anxiety scatters your focus - You aren't able to settle down and be in the right frame of mind to make a clear-headed, informed, conscious decision. You're not there, you're all over the place, like trying to listen in on half-a-dozen on-going conversations at once.
• Anxiety leaves you indecisive - There's not enough of you to make a united, singular choice, being you've split up trying to cover all the bases. You're a house divided, you want to make the best choice but you're just not sure, and you're caught with one foot half-way out the door.
  
• Anxiety can leave you looping (and feeling loopy) - You get stuck in a repeating tangled track and you can't get off.
  
• Anxiety can leave you paralyzed - You can't move and this weighs you down even more.

How do you deal with it in real-time action?
Set a time for you to focus solely on what's making you anxious. Prepare writing materials and make sure you have the quiet and privacy you need. Once you've settled down, look for and identify what is bugging you -- or more aptly, what's eating at you. Write it all out. List it down, and do a brain-dump on paper. When you've squeezed your brain dry, step back and assess the 'damage' . Sort out the mish-mash by timeliness and importance.Compartmentalizing helps put each item in its proper place. Arranging things by timeliness and  priorities, lay them out over a week or two, or over the month if it's needed. Make a good to-do list to focus on for all the days of the week, over the month (or months).  Do what you need to do. Do one thing at a time. Be there when you're doing it.

To get it unstuck you have to get your metaphorical hands dirty, and do the work of handling the things you don't really want to handle. You have to look at that tangled mess blocking you, assess the situation, and act on clearing it out. Muddling through anxiety is like trying to do your work with a cloud of mosquitoes around your head. You can't see clearly to focus, and it takes all of your attention swatting them away.

When you decide, you're taking advantage of the moment. That moment, that opening which asks, "where do we go now?" You choose with what you know at that moment, what you have at that moment, the resources, information and demands of that moment. Try not to get ahead of yourself by squeezing in more and more stuff on you plate. Sooner or later, something's going to fall off, and it might be something that's important, but doesn't feel that urgent.

Now, not every decision needs to be a heavy one. Can you imaging being using all of your mental RAM every time you need to decide something in just one day?  There's no need to be full-on involved and unnecessarily inflating the gravity of the situation. Go to automatic thinking, go with your preferences or flip a coin. Don't over-think it. The world won't end if you go for full fat, or onion rings instead of the usual french fries.

Set things up before-hand to eliminate piddling decisions. As an example, Steve Jobs took out the pressure of what to wear by settling on his uniform of an Issey Miyake  black turtleneck, Levi’s 501 jeans, and gray New Balance sneakers. You may not want or even need to resort to such an extreme, but it's an example that can spark you to institute some genuine changes in your life.

Now pay attention: Let's say you make 300 decisions a day. Let's say 10 percent of those decisions are the heavy hitters ---that's 30, by the way-- and 10 percent of those --that's 3, if you're still with me-- have the potential to be life-changing in one way or another. Don't you think it's important enough to deal with anxiety to find out those 3 things and focus on making the best decisions for yourself? And following through, of course.

Anxiety is affect by proportionality : Are your fears rooted in reality or growing all out of scale? A good solution is action. It may be stuttering, slow action, but if you think of it as gaining momentum, action can help you out of the limbo anxiety leaves you in. Action reorients you towards what you want and focus on the tasks needed to make these things yours.

That's how you keep going --even if you move at  half-dead zombie shuffle, you keep at it.
Somebody has to make sure the kids get to school in the morning clean and fed.
Somebody has to iron out the bugs and check the coding line per line.
Somebody has to place the order and make sure it's the right one, it'll come on time, and in the right quantities.
Somebody has to make the effort to  make that dream come true.

And if that's you, and it needs to be done, get out of your own way and do it. Feeling are feelings, they are of the moment. Consistent action is what you do to attain your goal. Squeeze and dig your way out from under the burden of anxiety by methodically eliminating the issues that piled up,and count your victories in concrete actions. If you don't, you give your fears more power than your actions, and that's just wasteful. You're better than that. You can prove to yourself. And you already know how.