Anxiety makes everyone dumber by activating the flight-or-fight sympathetic nervous system, which suppresses higher cognitive functions. And anxiety can make people dumb in a second way, by making them indecisive. That’s because the down-sides of any course of action seem more severe. That includes accepting a new belief as a result of thinking. So that could be most of what’s going on.
I also wonder if your specific anxiety has attached to thinking, creating an ugh field around it.
These theories are a result of studying dopamine function in decision-making as a career, and having a long-term partner with clinical anxiety.
I think clinicians would agree that anxiety makes people dumber in proportion to how anxious they are, that anxiety causes indecision, and that anxiety can attach to any specific topic, including “thinking”.
Indecision extending to not accepting beliefs as the result of thinking is my own theory, although I think it’s likely to be correct. I think most clinicians would neither agree nor disagree on that, since it’s more of a detailed neuroscience/cognitive psychology theory, and only a few specialists even think about higher cognition in that kind of mechanistic detail.
If some of that is correct, you might improve your thinking by being easier on yourself. Saying “yay me, I’m thinking about something even if it’s not going as well as I’d like” might be a good step. Focusing on goals appears to be the best known approach to anxiety; see the Acceptance and Commitment Therapy overview, which appears to have better results than any other clinical approach to anxiety.
Finally, let me point out that you can in fact think rather well in some cases, because this question contains a well-thought-out theory of thinking, and applies it to you in a unique way. So I’m pretty sure you did some good thinking to come up with this detailed and unique question. However you managed that might be a road map to thinking better.
Very interesting comment, thanks! Basically all of it rings true to me, except that I doubt my anxiety is exactly about ‘thinking’. Something closely related, but I’m not yet sure what.
I think maybe you are anxious about thinking.
Anxiety makes everyone dumber by activating the flight-or-fight sympathetic nervous system, which suppresses higher cognitive functions. And anxiety can make people dumb in a second way, by making them indecisive. That’s because the down-sides of any course of action seem more severe. That includes accepting a new belief as a result of thinking. So that could be most of what’s going on.
I also wonder if your specific anxiety has attached to thinking, creating an ugh field around it.
These theories are a result of studying dopamine function in decision-making as a career, and having a long-term partner with clinical anxiety.
I think clinicians would agree that anxiety makes people dumber in proportion to how anxious they are, that anxiety causes indecision, and that anxiety can attach to any specific topic, including “thinking”.
Indecision extending to not accepting beliefs as the result of thinking is my own theory, although I think it’s likely to be correct. I think most clinicians would neither agree nor disagree on that, since it’s more of a detailed neuroscience/cognitive psychology theory, and only a few specialists even think about higher cognition in that kind of mechanistic detail.
If some of that is correct, you might improve your thinking by being easier on yourself. Saying “yay me, I’m thinking about something even if it’s not going as well as I’d like” might be a good step. Focusing on goals appears to be the best known approach to anxiety; see the Acceptance and Commitment Therapy overview, which appears to have better results than any other clinical approach to anxiety.
Finally, let me point out that you can in fact think rather well in some cases, because this question contains a well-thought-out theory of thinking, and applies it to you in a unique way. So I’m pretty sure you did some good thinking to come up with this detailed and unique question. However you managed that might be a road map to thinking better.
Very interesting comment, thanks! Basically all of it rings true to me, except that I doubt my anxiety is exactly about ‘thinking’. Something closely related, but I’m not yet sure what.