summary
This conversation delves into the complexities of anxiety, its impact on cognitive control, and the resulting negative perceptions that can ensue. Jess discusses how anxiety can lead to a cycle of self-criticism and heightened emotional states, ultimately affecting one's ability to function effectively. The discussion emphasizes the importance of understanding these processes to foster self-compassion and mitigate the effects of anxiety on daily life.
takeaways
- Anxiety can lead to a loss of functionality and self-criticism.
- Cognitive control is a limited resource that diminishes with anxiety.
- Anxiety biases our perception towards negative stimuli.
- Anxiety can create a mental prison that limits perception.
- Negative emotions can create a self-feeding loop of anxiety.
- Anxiety can provoke other mental health issues and result in clinical levels of psychopathology.
- Training attention towards neutral or positive stimuli can be beneficial.
- Self-compassion is crucial in managing anxiety.
keywords
anxiety, cognitive control, mental health, emotional well-being, negative perception, self-compassion, psychological processes, environmental anxiety
extended transcript
First, today, I want to be clear that if you’re experiencing anxiety right about now… you ain’t wrong.
In our little drop on differentiating fear, anxiety, stress, phobia, and paranoia I stated emphatically that anything besides FEAR is a pre-emptive, semi-imagined, condition. You aren’t in immediate, observable, danger. And the mind can peel away from reality, not understanding it’s own predictive and hypothetical abilities, creating undue suffering.
…. And also.
Sometimes you, the rope, are NOT actively witnessing an axe-wielding opponent immediately swinging towards you, to inspire pure fear.
But you can see their shadow growing larger on the frosted window just outside the shop, weapon overhead. Or you can see it chopping away at other garage items and realize that you’re not so different from them, and vice versa. (Sidenote: Hopefully you do realize this)
No, maybe the time for threat-based, physical, fear, for you personally isn’t RIGHT NOW – but that doesn’t mean the threat isn’t active. Isn’t likely to be happening, in your direction, soon, or eventually. Or isn’t already happening at another… rope. Which is upsetting.
When using critical thought to try to reason your way to a more balanced internal state… you may find that you have bountiful evidence that your anxiety is NOT a wild story in your head.
And I’m not going to argue with any of that.
In my opinion, if you’re not anxious right about now, you’re not paying attention outside of your algorithm or an ego issue is underway.
So, let’s not fall into toxic positivity or, alternatively, chide ourselves for anticipatory nerves as we examine our shared environment.
And also. What I’m actually here to say is… Please know that suffering can be additionally increased and extended by the loss of functioning that comes with heightened anxiety… especially via self-criticism about that loss of functionality caused by anxiety.
As in: “Why can’t I just do everything on my list these days?! Why has work become so much harder? Why does life feel so much heavier? Or even impossible to attend to? Why am I forgetting things? Why am I dropping the ball? Or failing to pick it up in the first place? Nothing is even happening! I’m ‘JUST’ anxious.”
And the self-compassionless spiral begins. The ironic processes of mental control heighten. Criticism plus hypervigilance plus self-monitoring become one soulless conglomerate bringing hell straight to your skull, leaving you with even less resources for functioning and accomplishing.
Which feeds back into the criticism, vigilance, and monitoring.
So. To spare some of that potential SLEW misery…
Today let’s talk about the ways anxiety affects the mind and its ability to function at the degree we desire. So that we’re aware.. and less likely to estimate we’re busted. So that we can have less anxiety about the effects of anxiety. So we can counteract the cognitive drain, in the ways that are possible. And less self-flagellation at a time when we really don’t need the extra whipping.
Valitory rant over.
Onto our paper! Today we’ll get through the introductory concepts. For everyone’s attentional ease, we’re taking this bite by bite and giving time for processing.
The Influence of Anxiety on Cognitive Control Processes. DeMond M. Grant and Evan J. White. 2016.
They tell us:
Cognitive control is the ability to direct attention and cognitive resources to achieve one’s goals. Research indicates that anxiety biases multiple cognitive processes. This occurs in part because anxiety leads to excessive processing of threatening stimuli at the expense of ongoing activities.
(Things we know from experience. Anxiety is consuming. The more attention we pay to potential threats, the less attention we have for everything else. Like basic functioning, self-care, short-term and complex long-term goals, reading and crunching numbers at a desk.
And because we’re evolutionarily wired to pay attention to threats, we – as animals - are naturally primed for this energy suck to take place. We don’t need trauma for it to take place. Bad news and bumps in the night have a way of engulfing our mentalities.
… THEN layer in the trauma history and our minds are taking us on time traveling journeys we never asked for, in reaction to the anxiety, on top.
They say:)
In addition, emotional information is maintained in our thoughts, which can lead to impaired concentration, as well as deficits in our ability to notice and correct any resulting mistakes. Therefore, elevated levels of anxiety are characterized by biases in both automatic and strategic ways in how one perceives their world. These biases are displayed to stimuli relevant to their fears.
(In other words, anxiety is thought based. Thoughts and emotions influence each other. So our anxieties affect our moods. And sustain our moods.
And our moods tend to further distract from what we need to focus on.
Then, taken together, perceptions are skewed towards stimuli that capture our thoughts and feelings, so that we focus on what we fear, and don’t observe, absorb, or interact with other information. Thus, shaping our entire perception and perspective.)
Anxiety also is characterized by biases in later, more elaborative processes.
(My words: such as our perspective and capacity for later perceptions.)
For example, anxious individuals will interpret neutral information as threatening. Research has found that non-anxious individuals tend to interpret ambiguous information as positive, whereas anxious individuals do not display this positivity bias…
(and) individuals who were trained to attend to negative stimuli displayed an increase in negative mood during a subsequent stress task, whereas individuals trained to attend to neutral stimuli displayed no change in mood. This suggests that attention biases to negative information may contribute to negative mood states.
(Okay. Not only are we more likely to be anxious in the face of events as a default reaction once we’ve already BEEN anxious or have developed an anxiety disorder… but we’re also more likely to be negative Nancies in our moods. Anxiety forms our perspectives, bottlenecks our perceptions, and limits our available emotional states.
It’s also interesting that they discuss training participants to notice neutral or negative stimuli, when we consider how our families may have done the same thing years ago. And the media has been following suit… up to this day.
This clustermess of negativity which filters out anything but, then… yep! Primes us, once again, for interpreting new stimulation events as threatening.
Unaddressed, anxiety can become a mental and emotional prison. Which are like walls built outside of walls, reinforcing each other, so we can’t spoon-tunnel the way out.)
This research broadly suggests that anxious individuals tend to allocate their attention initially to threatening stimuli, interpret neutral stimuli as negative, and are subsequently more likely to remember these stimuli.
(So, we also don’t commit neutral or positive events to memory. Our anxiety, negative emotions, and events become all we can even recall.)
Furthermore, many theoretical models have suggested that these biases play a causal role in the development of clinically significant levels of psychopathology.
(This negativity anxiety spiral we’re describing… sets us up for psychic disfunction. As you might imagine, once everything appears frightening and negative – and that’s all we can remember from the past or witness in the present - rumination, obsession, hypervigilance, defeat, demoralization, and depression aren’t far away. As if anxiety, itself, wasn’t psychically disruptive… pile on the trauma comorbidities and see how we fare.
Answer: pathologically.
And none of that is helped by what’s next. The meat of our conversation that we’re juuuuust starting to bite into with all this other damning news:)
One factor that is likely associated with cognitive biases broadly is cognitive control. Cognitive control has been defined as the ability to adapt our attention and responses in order to respond appropriately to the environment.
(Iif all we’re seeing and feeling is negative… we are not capable of responding appropriately to the environment. We’re likely to be defensive and even offensive, in self-protective states against all the threats, by default. It’s no longer in our control.
And here’s the kicker to explain why:)
Cognitive control is thought of as a limited resource system that directs our perceptions, mental imagery, and responses in order to perform complex tasks.
(As anxiety goes up, cognitive control goes down, and our ability to do more than survive or think about surviving declines. There is an opportunity cost – a biological psychological expense – associated with anxiety. Which puts our energy into getting through (potentially imagined or overly-focused-upon) threats and leaves us unable to respond to anything outside of that narrow window of anxious attention.
Hmm. Yeah. Sounds like all of my twenties and certain months of my more recent experience. How about you?
And that’s what we’re here to understand, so we can cut ourselves some compassionate checks.
So. To wrap this up today and summarize:
- Anxiety affects multiple cognitive processes at the expense of ongoing activities, limiting what complex tasks we can complete.
- We’re wired to focus on the negative, so this happens easily, even without trauma histories. With them, we’re also triggered into historical mindstates so that our current anxiety is bolstered by past anxiety, and we’re unable to bring ourselves into modern reality.
- Plus. Once we’ve had anxiety, we’re prone to interpret more stimulatory events as anxiety-producing.
- Then, that emotional information is maintained in our thoughts, which can lead to impaired concentration and sustained states of negativity. Negative emotion also influences our thoughts in a bottom-up direction, so they tend to return to our anxieties…. Creating a self-feeding loop that’s difficult to escape from.
- Humans also tend to extend and elaborate anxious thoughts with additional processing, creating negatively slanted stories that limit what else can be remembered from the past or perceived in the present and future.
- This anxious death spiral of negative, threat-based observing, thinking, feeling, remembering, and anticipating can create psychopathology. Sticky and recurring states of cognitive dysfunction that negatively affect the individual’s wellbeing.
- My words, outside of the paper’s scope: anxiety can assist in provoking depression, hypervigilance, obsession, and attentional disorders. None of which assist with the negativity bias, emotional disruptions, or loss of cognitive functioning that we’re about to discuss in greater detail.
So. This information may help to make sense of your past experiences as an anxiety prisoner. Or current struggles with states of negativity, uncontrollable thought, and limitations to perceptions.
Hopefully, leading you to “forgive” yourself for any resulting relationship, work, or personal challenges you’ve faced. Or at least stop being SO self-judgmental about them.
And so… our introduction to basic anxiety information concludes for today! If you’ve already heard enough from this paper I understand. Many of these takeaways could be used to describe highly torturous years of existence, and that may be enough.
If not, shall we talk about all the ways cognitive control is affected by anxiety, creating loss of human functionality in a world that’s obsessed with it?
We shall.
Coming back next time, we’ll begin to move through the three processes of cognitive control and how they’re impacted by anxiety, per the literature. Selective attention, memory, and performance monitoring. The psychological events that shape our success and sense of safety living as ourselves… or… not so much. In a way that’s truly, unfortunately, out of our ability to “just stop it.”
Cheers y’all. Take care out there.
As far as I’m concerned, in 2025 environmental anxiety isn’t wrong! But watch those threat biases and elaborative processes, as possible, in the ways that you can. Or they can become a perspective prison.
Hail yourself.
Try to train yourself to notice SOMETHING good today. And everyday.
Don’t forget your compassion for self and other.
And I’ll talk to you soon.