Anxiety is one of the most common psychological pathologies in the general population and therefore one of the most studied.
However, we could be facing side effects that until now had not been given the importance they deserve. With this article we will try to discover If anxiety could in some cases affect the patient on a cognitive level
In order to address the question of whether anxiety problems can cause cognitive deficits, we must first consider some questions. The reality is that when talking about generalized anxiety disorder, professionals face a huge range of possible symptoms, which also manifest themselves in a specific way or with a certain intensity depending on each patient.
Some of these symptoms at a psychological level could be extreme and disproportionate worry in some situations, constant rumination and visualizations of pessimistic scenarios, perception of threats in any scenario, regardless of whether the stimuli are aversive or not, low tolerance for uncertainty or fear. in making decisions.
Ruminations and a feeling of worry would be a constant in the individual. Likewise, it would have great problems focusing attention and also calming down, since the nervous state would be very common. With this scenario, it is not difficult to anticipate that the answer to whether anxiety problems can cause cognitive deficits will be affirmative.
The question that should concern us, in fact, is not whether anxiety pathology can cause deficits in cognition, but to what extent this phenomenon occurs, what areas are affected and what are the repercussions that this symptomatology can have as well as its reversibility.
What are the cognitive consequences of anxiety?
Entering the field of cognition factors that could be affected by an anxiety disorder, there are several that we can take into account. Let’s review the most important ones.
First of all we would find selective attention, by which we are able to focus our attention on a specific stimulus, looking for a specific pattern among all the amalgamation of information that we perceive through the senses. This ability could decrease due to anxiety, which would make it difficult to discriminate between all this data, making selective attention not as fast and effective as it should be under normal conditions.
2. Working memory
One of the executive functions where anxiety could be interfering would be working memory. This function is what allows the brain to store information temporarily to be able to actively process that data When we ask ourselves if anxiety problems can cause cognitive deficits, we must not forget that memory can be one of the most affected.
3. Inhibitory control
Inhibitory control or cognitive inhibition is the ability we have to control those impulsive responses to certain stimuli and instead be able to modulate the response through reason When anxiety disorders such as GAD generate difficulties in inhibitory control, it will be easier for the patient to get carried away by automatic responses guided by emotions and impulsivity instead of giving weight to previous reasoning.
4. Decision making
As we saw in the previous point, anxiety could be weakening our ability to make rational decisions When we are enveloped by anxiety-inducing effects, it will be more likely that we will find it difficult to make a decision in a calculated and rational manner. Instead we could opt for a quick and visceral response, without correctly evaluating the repercussions of each of the alternatives we were considering for the specific issue.
5. Emotional processing
Another cognitive factor that could be diminished in patients who suffer from anxiety is the one that It has to do with the identification and processing of emotions In that sense, the individual could experience difficulties when capturing the emotions of both himself and others. He might not identify them correctly, not do it as quickly as before, or attribute emotional states that do not correspond at that moment, affected by what he is really feeling.
Another effect that anxiety can have on our cognition is to enhance the possibility of falling into biases, such as correspondence or attribution error, also called fundamental attribution error. This mental shortcut makes us tend to associate certain behaviors with specific types of people instead of reasonably evaluating the true factors underlying said behaviors.
The importance of emotional stimuli
Once we know how anxiety problems can cause cognitive deficits, since we have taken a tour of those factors that can most easily be altered, it is time to study one of the elements that most affects these deficits. These are stimuli of an emotional nature. It is no surprise that a stimulus that generates negative emotions in a person with anxiety will most likely enhance its effects.
Along these lines, an individual who suffers from anxiety in any of its forms, such as generalized anxiety disorder, and who perceives a stimulus as threatening, will see an increase in the anxiety symptoms that he suffers from due to his pathology. This increase in stress could cloud or generate difficulties in some of the cognitive functions that we have seen previously.
Especially the abilities that have to do with working memory, the focusing of selective attention or inhibitory control would be altered. This hypothesis could be verified through an experiment in which a group of participants were asked to perform tasks in which these faculties came into play, after having been subjected to stressors that caused anxiety symptoms.
The results showed that these individuals scored significantly lower than the components of the control group, who had performed the tasks without having been exposed to said stress conditions. Further evidence that the answer to whether anxiety problems can cause cognitive deficits is positive.
Reversibility
After knowing in depth how anxiety and disorders related to it can affect a person’s cognitive faculties, a very pertinent question remains to be asked: are these deficits reversible? The answer is reassuring: yes they are. Anxiety is a disorder that affects many aspects of the life of the person who suffers from it, but The positive part is that it is a highly studied pathology with many treatment options
The person who suffers from anxiety and who begins psychological therapy to remedy this situation will experience a progressive improvement in all anxious symptoms, both in its psychological and physical aspects. As this happens, The cognitive deficits that had emerged in this individual should be subsiding to return to its state prior to the onset of anxiety.
In order to facilitate this process and speed it up, the therapist can propose specific exercises to the patient aimed at working on these abilities specifically. For example, you could assign some activities in which the subject had to discriminate between different elements to locate a specific pattern, abstracting from the feelings of anxiety.
Likewise, you can also focus on working memory work, doing simple problems that require attention and reflection on different elements without being frustrating for the person but requiring a certain effort to be able to exercise cognitive abilities and thus overcome more quickly the effects that anxiety could have caused.
The conclusion we must reach regarding whether anxiety problems can cause cognitive deficits is that yes, it can indeed occur and in fact it is common in the wide variety of symptoms and effects, as we have already seen in detail, but this does not It must be hopeless for the person who suffers from it, since it is a reversible process and can also be stopped more quickly through simple exercises.
The most important thing, as always when there is a mental health disorder involved, is to put yourself in the hands of a good psychology specialist in order to find the remedy as soon as possible.
