Can Anxiety Problems Cause Cognitive Deficits?

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 cognitively.

• Related article: "Types of Anxiety Disorders and their characteristics"

Can anxiety disorders produce cognitive deficits?

In order to face the question of whether anxiety problems can cause cognitive deficits, we must first consider a few questions. The reality is that when talking about generalized anxiety disorder, professionals are faced with a huge range of possible symptoms, which also manifest themselves in a specific way or with a specific intensity depending on each patient.

Some of these symptoms at a psychological level could be an extreme and disproportionate concern in some situations, constant rumination and visualizations of scenarios pessimistic, perception of threats in any setting, regardless of whether the stimuli are aversive or not, low tolerance for uncertainty or fear when taking decisions.

Rumination and the feeling of worry would be a constant in the individual. Likewise, it would have big trouble focusing your attention and also calming down, since the state of nerves 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 yes.

The question that should occupy 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 may have, as well as its reversibility.

What are the cognitive sequelae 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. We are going to review the most important ones.

1. Selective attention

In the first place we would find selective attention, by which we are able to fix our attention on a specific stimulus, looking for a specific pattern among all the amalgam of information that we perceive through the senses. This ability could decrease because of anxiety, which would make it difficult to discriminate between all those data, making selective attention not as fast and efficient as it should under conditions normal.

2. Work 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 in order to be able to actively elaborate on that data. When we ask ourselves if anxiety problems can cause cognitive deficits, we must not forget that memory can be one of the great damages.

• You may be interested in: "Working memory (operational): components and functions"

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 let yourself be carried away by automatic responses guided by emotions and impulsiveness instead of giving weight to reasoning previous.

4. Decision making

As we saw in the previous point, anxiety could be weakening our ability to make rational decisions. When we are involved by anxiety effects, it will be more likely that it will be difficult for us to make a decision in a calculated and rational way. Instead we could opt for a quick and visceral response, without correctly evaluating the repercussions of each of the alternatives that we were handling for the specific question.

5. Emotional processing

Another cognitive factor that could be diminished in patients suffering from anxiety is that has to do with identifying and processing emotions. In this sense, the individual could experience difficulties when it comes to capturing the emotions of both himself and others. He could 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 actually feeling.

6. Fundamental attribution error

Another effect that anxiety can cause on our cognition is to enhance the possibility of falling into bias, such as correspondence or attribution, also called fundamental attribution error. This mental shortcut makes us tend to associate certain behaviors with specific types of person instead of reasonably evaluating the true factors that underlie 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. It is about stimuli of an emotional nature. It is no surprise that a stimulus that generates negative emotions in a person with anxiety is most likely going to enhance its effects.

In this line, an individual who suffers from anxiety in some of its forms, such as generalized anxiety disorder, and who perceives a stimulus as threatening, you will see an increase in anxiety symptoms that you suffer from as a result of your pathology. This increased stress could cloud or cause difficulties in some of the cognitive functions that we have been seeing previously.

Especially the capacities that have to do with working memory, the focus of selective attention or inhibitory control are being altered. This hypothesis has been verified through an experiment in which a group of participants were asked to perform tasks in which said faculties came into play, after having been subjected to stressors that caused symptoms anxious.

The results showed that these individuals scored significantly below the components of the control group, who had performed the tasks without having been exposed to such stressful conditions. Yet another piece of evidence that the answer to whether anxiety problems can cause cognitive deficits is positive.

Reversibility

After knowing in depth how anxiety and the disorders related to it can affect the cognitive faculties of a person, a very pertinent question remains to be asked: are these deficits? 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 very studied pathology and with many treatment options.

The person who suffers from anxiety and who starts psychological therapy to remedy said situation, will go experiencing a progressive improvement in all anxiety symptoms, both in its psychological and physical. As this happens, the cognitive deficits that had arisen in this individual should gradually subside to return to its state before 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 specific capacities. For example, you could entrust him with some activities in which the subject had to discriminate between different elements to locate a specific pattern, abstracting from the sensations of anxiety.

You can also focus on working memory work, doing simple problems that require attention and reflection on different elements, without becoming frustrating for the person but requiring a certain effort to be able to exercise the cognitive abilities and thus overcome faster the effects that anxiety could have caused.

The conclusion that 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 should not be hopeless for the person who suffers from it, since it is a reversible process and that can also be tackled more quickly by 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 psychologist so that you can find the remedy as soon as possible.

Bibliographic references:

• Calvo, M.G., García, M.D. (2000). Anxiety and cognition: an integrative framework. Spanish Magazine of Motivation and Emotion.
• Langarita-Llorente, R., Gracia-García, P. (2019). Neuropsychology of generalized anxiety disorder: systematic review. Rev. neurol. (Ed. impr.).
• Packard, M.G. (2009). Anxiety, cognition, and habit: a multiple memory systems perspective. Brain research. Elsevier.
• Sylvester, C.M., Corbetta, M., Raichle, M.E., Rodebaugh, T., Schlaggar, B.L., Sheline, Y.I., Zorumski, C.F., Lenze, E.J. (2012). Functional network dysfunction in anxiety and anxiety disorders. Trends in Neurosciences. Elsevier.