summary
This conversation delves into the intricate relationship between anxiety and cognitive control processes, exploring how anxiety affects selective attention, working memory, and performance monitoring. It highlights the challenges faced by anxious individuals in managing their cognitive resources and emphasizes the importance of self-compassion in mitigating the negative effects of anxiety on functionality.
takeaways- Anxiety depletes cognitive resources, affecting clear thinking.
- Selective attention is crucial for effective goal-directed behavior.
- Anxious individuals are more likely to focus on threatening stimuli.
- Working memory is essential for manipulating information and problem-solving.
- Anxiety reduces working memory capacity and efficiency.
- Worry consumes working memory resources, impacting performance.
- Executive function deficits are linked to various anxiety disorders.
- Performance monitoring becomes challenging during anxious episodes.
- Self-compassion is vital for managing anxiety and cognitive control.
- Understanding anxiety's impact can lead to better coping strategies.
keyword
sanxiety, cognitive control, selective attention, working memory, performance monitoring, emotional regulation, mental health, self-compassion, executive functions, psychological resilience
Transcript
We return to speak on the influence of anxiety on cognitive control processes, Demond Grant and Evan J. White, 2016.
Today, going beyond "anxiety exhausts and depletes the ability to think clearly about reality" and into discussing the particular ways that anxiety rids us of mental, emotional functionality.
Let's waste no time.
Selective Attention.
Cognitive control is a broad construct that reflects many underlying processes.
This, in part, is conducted through what's known as a central executive, which manages attention and working memory.
Results of statistical modeling suggest that there are three executive functions. Inhibition, shifting, and updating. Inhibition refers to the ability to inhibit automatic or pre-potent responses.
Shifting refers to the ability to switch between different tasks or mental operations.
Finally, the last executive function refers to the ability to update and monitor the contents of working memory. These are the tasks we need to maintain any control. Inhibition of attentional distractions, shifting to our chosen target, and monitoring for sustained focus and feedback.
Attention is thought of as a process that regulates perception, memory, and responses of the nervous system to incoming stimuli.
Selective attention can be defined as what occurs when cognitive resources are utilized to engage in enhanced processing of certain incoming stimuli. The result is cognitive resources are focused while irrelevant stimuli are ignored. Therefore, selective attention is highly important to any goal-directed behavior.
Sure, you don't need selective attention if you're waffling through a day basking in the freedom of wasted time.
But without it, we're about as focused, functional, and effective as gnats or hyper golden retriever puppies - bouncing attention from moving target to moving target without enduring concentration to get anything pointedly accomplished a statement made more damning when we again consider how emotions come into play.
Emotional stimuli capture our attention particularly individuals with elevated anxiety. Anxious individuals are primed to attend to threatening images and words.
In addition, researchers have found that anxiety is associated with sustained attentional processing for threatening stimuli.
Big emotions affect our attention in a magnetic way, and we hold a lot of big emotions. We're potentiated to be anxious, to be negative, and to be drawn into both conditions with less stimulatory inspiration than others.
Then we're more likely to spend resources trying to understand these stimulating events, combined with our thoughts and feelings.
If you're finding it difficult to escape from an attentional suck these days, please know that you are biologically primed for a heightened anxiety experience and resulting loss of functionality.
And if you're within the more at-risk groups we've been speaking about recently, those of sexual and racial minorities, the less financially resourced women being a product of familial mental illness,.. then you're also probably more affected by what is happening in society both directly and psychologically.
In sum, consistent evidence suggests that anxiety is associated with biases in selective attention for emotional stimuli.
Selective attention is highly related to working memory. Therefore, understanding how anxiety affects attention likely has implications for working memory processes as well.
Bringing us to our next cognitive control process
.
Working memory.
Working memory involves the ability to temporarily store and manipulate information from the environment and or our memories.
Fact. Working memory relies on holding information and separately manipulating the data.
Hey, remember this series of numbers, 846218.
Now reorganize that series of numbers into chronological order in your head.
Two different tasks with one being easier and more efficient than the other, right? Now imagine if your nervous system was screeching, easily distracted, having difficulty sustaining attention.
And try again.
761-825. You got the energy and focus you need?
Working memory is a limited capacity system involving the regulation and manipulation of information necessary to complete current goals.
Working memory resources are required for a wide variety of tasks, such as reading, engaging in mental math, as well as complex actions, including planning future behavior and generating solutions to problems.
We can know what a problem is. Remember it clearly.
But that's different from being able to solve the issue. And this differential is contained within working memory.
Working memory capacity is associated with a wide variety of cognitive operations, such as intelligence, multitasking, and emotional regulation.
And speaking to the three functions of executive control, Inhibition, shifting, and updating:
Research suggests that anxiety is associated with decreased efficiency, i.e. anxious individuals require more attentional resources to maintain performance in central executive functioning. This is particularly true for the inhibition and shifting focus functions.
Anxiety, therefore, makes it more difficult for us to tune out distractions and redirect our attention to chosen stimuli, tasks, and goals.
Compared to anxiety-untouched individuals, anxious ones expend more resources to complete the same mental work... assuming they have the threshold resources necessary to complete it
Anxiety and particularly worry decreases working memory resources. Hayes, Hirsch, and Matthews, 2008, evaluated differences in working memory capacity between high and low worriers.
Results found that high worriers displayed decreased performance compared to low worriers, particularly when engaging in worry. These results support the hypothesis that worry takes up working memory resources among chronic worriers.
As a worrier, an individual can thus expect lower working memory performance always, and the result is exacerbated when the worrying is actively taking place.
Research also has found that these executive function deficits may be related to specific symptoms of psychopathology.
For example, deficits in inhibiting intrusive memories have been linked to PTSD symptoms. Inhibition deficits also have been found for panic disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, and social anxiety disorder.
The comorbid horsemen of PTSD. Together, they make it difficult for us to choose our views, our perceptions, and make use of them. And vice versa.
It's a chicken or the egg situation here.
In sum, considerable research suggests that anxiety affects working memory, both in terms of capacity as well as specific functions of the central executive. This research is particularly consistent for worry reducing working memory capacity.
Bringing us to our third and final cognitive control process.
Performance monitoring.
Successful performance requires awareness of mistakes and changing behavior in order to adapt to environmental demands.
This becomes more difficult during anxious spells, which is why critical thinking and reality testing are the antidotes to undue anxiety when we can engage with them.
When trying to decide how to respond to stimuli in one's environment, mental representations of appropriate behaviors are activated in working memory in order to select one's response. Appropriate responding to the environment requires monitoring of these mental representations, as well as adjusting one's behavior once an error has occurred.
Meaning, we have an idea of how things work, who people, ourselves included, are, and how our actions impact the environment. These are mental representations, or approximations of our understandings and expectations.
And...
Anxiety makes it difficult to notice when those ideas aren't matching ongoing reality in order to adjust those representations and our behaviors. We can end up living out of beliefs that have no true basis without noticing it or amending it.
But we might notice that we're doing *something* wrong... without having that capacity to delineate what the mismatch is or attending to it.
Several studies have found evidence that error-related negativity amplitude is enhanced in individuals with high trait anxiety as well as anxiety disorders.
Individuals with generalized anxiety disorder displayed an enhanced error-related negativity compared to healthy participants and error-related negativity amplitude was correlated with self-reported anxious symptoms.
This suggests that individuals with generalized anxiety disorder may devote excessive attentional resources towards errors, which may play a role in the phenomenology of the disorder. Anxiety disorders, social anxiety obsessive-compulsive disorder, and high levels of trait anxiety are associated with increased error monitoring.
If this makes you think of ironic processes of cognitive control, me too.
More anxious individuals have stronger awareness of their quote "failures" without deeper comprehension of what's causing them or the capacity to do anything about it.
This feeds back into creating a negative internal environment which again boosts error monitoring and related negativity without working memory resources to do anything about those issues.
And that nicely summarizes why we started this series on self-loathing at the end of the world with anxiety.
To summarize from this paper,
Across these literatures, it is clear that anxiety affects a broad array of cognitive control processes.
The three big takeaways were:
There is evidence that anxiety disorders are characterized by selective attention biases at multiple stages of processing, including sustained attention.
Second, anxiety symptoms appear to reduce working memory capacity as well as impair the ability to inhibit threatening stimuli from entering working memory.
Third, anxious individuals devote excessive attentional resources towards monitoring errors, but reduced ability to engage cognitive control in order to change behavior.
And that, fucker, is why a brain might be consumed by anxiety, unable to function in the full breadth of complex tasks that modern life, and additional challenges piled on that modern life, requires, and incapable of altering its behaviors to make improvements, while being *aware* of the negative results that it's achieving in a critical, anxiety re-upping, way.
And a mind can be incapable to easily just stop or otherwise alter what is happening.
Once anxiety goes up, functionality goes down.
If you're noticing any of this now, in the future, or reflecting on the past, hopefully you know why some months or years may have been anxious tailspins that created loss of goal accomplishment and general clarity.
And hopefully you believe that getting up your own asshole about it will enhance your monitoring for self-errors, degrading your esteem and driving up negativity so that the anxious noose tightens.
In other words, upon anxiety upticks, we must have self-compassion.
Talk to yourself, ask what is going on, investigate it, and provide support.
Reason with your mind to bring perspectives to a more neutral ground which will allow similar perceptions through the gate.
You have to be your own parent, partner, and closest friend when anxiety rears its head, not your own antagonist on top of whatever is already causing the upset.
Compassion, kindness, and care are *unfortunately* step one of escaping from the anxiety prison of reduced cognitive control.
Not thinking more about your errors or becoming harder on yourself.
Especially in times of environ mental illness.
Cheers fuckers, I'll talk to you soon.