It's really hard to say exactly what it might be, because I can think of several reasons this might happen, and you could have any of them, several of them, or none of them.

• Depression (my depression manifests as a loss of motivation. I'm still capable of doing things, I just have NO motivation to even start.)
• Anxiety (if Ns flipped the fuck out if you ever tried to do something yourself, you might get anxious when it comes to try ANYTHING, even if you totally have the skill to do it once you start. Because you're subconciously expecting your environment to get worse if you show motivation. Motivation made you a target. "Oh, you're cleaning your room? CLEAN THE ENTIRE HOUSE WHILE YOU'RE AT IT!")
• Executive dysfunction, which is a symptom of ADHD and other things (people with ADHD can end up targets of Ns and scapegoated because they're "different")
• Emotional flashbacks that have triggers tied to 'doing something'. For example, if being "productive" was a thing that would get your N freaking the fuck out, and acting crazy and stupid, it's "safer" to not do something even if you have the ability to do it.

Personally, aside from depression symptoms, I have triggers tied to the feeling of STRESS. Like, not a particular stressful thing, but the actual emotion of STRESS, no matter the actual cause of the stress.

I think it arose from a few things in childhood. I learn things pretty quickly, and as a result, all through school, subjects weren't HARD for me. I did not experience the type of everyday, non-emergency stress from ordinary schoolwork that others kids experienced, because school did not challenge me.

I don't say this to toot my own horn, but to illustrate that the emotional FEELING of stress never appeared internally in me due to "natural" causes, like having to truly study to learn something.

My whole relationship with "stress" was when someone dysfunctional or abuse and external to me flipped the fuck out, in a way that was out of my control. So my reaction was to get away from that stress--stay outside all day, go to the library, hide in a book.

Later on, when I got older, I began to procrastinate. I never did my homework but got As on tests. (Of course, never doing my homework meant I was failing classes despite my mastery of the material itself--yet, I still couldn't bring myself to do the homework. So I got some added suck with a bunch of guilt spirals and self-hate, and more running away from the stress of bad grades, because I thought I was a "bad kid" because I didn't do my homework.)

Turns out, when I had a task to do AT HOME, where all the dysfunctional people were, I felt stress even if the task was easy. So I procrastinated, and distracted myself with anything else, because that's how I learned to deal with stress when I was very young, and I couldn't really tell the difference between "good" stress, and dysfunctional stress. To me, all stress came from shit I couldn't control, so it didn't land home on me emotionally that DOING the homework would, in the large run, benefit me by removing the stress of being in class with another F for homework.

It probably wasn't until my 30s that I realized I was sort of "allergic to stress", because that feeling of things being stressful and hard launched me right into reading books, writing stories, or playing games, and basically procrastinating so I could get myself away from it.

I basically had to learn (and I am still learning) a more healthy relationship to stress. Basically, not to catastrophize it, or feel like it's something I can't change or have control over.