Can anxiety problems cause cognitive deficits?

Let's see if anxiety disturbances have a harmful impact on cognitive abilities.

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 have not been given the importance they deserve. With this article we will try to discover if the anxiety could in some cases affect the patient at cognitive level..

• Article related: "Types of Anxiety Disorders and their characteristics".

Can anxiety disorders produce cognitive deficits?

In order to address the question of whether anxiety problems can cause cognitive deficits we must first consider some issues. 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 certain intensity depending on each patient.

Some of these symptoms at the psychological level could be extreme and disproportionate worry in some situations, constant ruminations and visualizations of pessimistic scenarios, perception of threats in any scenario, regardless of whether the stimuli are aversive or not, low tolerance to uncertainty or fear in decision making.

Rumination and the feeling of worry would be a constant in the individual. Likewise, he/she would have would also have great problems to focus his attention and also to calm down, since the state of nervousnesssince the state of nervousness would be very common. With this scenario it is not difficult to anticipate that the answer to whether anxiety problems can cause cognitive deficits is going to be yes.

The question that should occupy us, in fact, is not whether anxiety pathology can cause deficits in cognition, but rather to what extent this phenomenon occurs, which areas are affected and what are the repercussions that this symptomatology can have, as well as its reversibility.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. Let us review the most important ones.

Selective attention

In the first place we would find ourselves with selective attention, by which we are able to fix our attention on a stimulus in concreteThe selective attention is a very important part of our attention, looking for a specific pattern among all the amalgam of information that we perceive through the senses. This capacity could be diminished due to anxiety, which would make it difficult to discriminate among all this data, making selective attention not as fast and efficient 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 the one that allows the brain to store information temporarily in order to be able to actively elaborate on this data.. When we ask ourselves if anxiety problems can cause cognitive deficits, we must not forget that memory can be one of the most damaged.

3. Inhibitory control

Inhibitory control or cognitive inhibition is the ability we have to control those impulsive responses to certain stimuli and instead modulate the response through reason. 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 be 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 undermining our ability to may be weakening our ability to make rational decisions.. When we are engulfed by the anxiogenic effects we are more likely to find it difficult to make a decision in a calculated and rational manner. Instead, we could opt for a quick and visceral response, without properly evaluating the repercussions of each of the alternatives we were handling for the specific issue.

5. Emotional processing

Another cognitive factor that may be impaired in patients suffering from anxiety is the one that has to do with the identification and that has to do with the identification and processing of emotions.. In that sense, the individual may experience difficulties in grasping the emotions of both him/herself and others. He/she may not identify them correctly, may not identify them as quickly as before or may attribute emotional states that do not correspond at that moment, affected by what he/she is actually feeling.

6. Fundamental attribution error

Another effect that anxiety can cause in our cognition is to enhance the possibility of falling into biases. the possibility of falling into biasesThe most common mental shortcut is the correspondence or attribution error, also known as the fundamental attribution error. This mental shortcut makes us tend to associate certain behaviors to specific types of people instead of reasonably assessing the real factors underlying these behaviors.

The importance of emotional stimuli

Once we know how anxiety problems can cause cognitive deficits, since we have already made a tour of those factors that can be more easily altered, it is time to study one of the elements that most affect these deficits. We are talking about 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.

In this line, an individual suffering 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 anxiogenic symptomatology he or she suffers from as a result of his or her pathology. This increase in stress could cloud or generate difficulties in some of the cognitive functions that we have seen previously. that we have been seeing previously.

In particular, the capacities related to working memory, selective attention focus or inhibitory control would be altered. This hypothesis has been tested by means of an experiment in which a group of participants 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 provoked anxiogenic symptoms.

The results showed that these individuals significantly lower than the components of the control group, who had performed the tasks without being exposed to such stress conditions.The control group, which had performed the tasks without having been exposed to such stress conditions, scored significantly lower than the control group. Further evidence that the answer to whether anxiety problems can cause cognitive deficits is positive.

Reversibility

After learning in depth how anxiety and anxiety-related disorders can affect a person's cognitive faculties, a very pertinent question remains: are these deficits reversible? The answer is reassuring: yes, they are. Anxiety is a disorder that affects many aspects of a sufferer's life, but the positive side is that it is a well-studied pathology with many treatment options..

The person who suffers from anxiety and who starts a psychological therapy to remedy this situation, will experience a progressive improvement in all the anxious symptomatology, both in its psychological and physical aspects. As this happens, the cognitive deficits that had arisen in this individual should gradually recede to return to their pre-anxiety state. to return to their state prior to the onset of anxiety.

In order to facilitate this process and speed it up, the therapist can propose to the patient specific exercises aimed at working on these specific abilities. For example, the therapist could ask the patient to perform some activities in which he/she has to discriminate between different elements in order to locate a specific pattern, thus abstracting from the anxious sensations.

Similarly, you can also focus on working memory work, performing simple problems that require attention and reflection on different elements, without being frustrating for the person but requiring some effort to exercise cognitive abilities and thus overcome more quickly the effects that anxiety could have caused.without becoming 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 that we must reach regarding whether anxiety problems can cause cognitive deficits is that yes, indeed it can occur and in fact it is common in the wide variety of symptoms and effects, as we have seen in detail, but this should not be hopeless for the person suffering from it, since it is a reversible process and also can be tackled more quickly through simple exercises.

The most important thing, as always when a mental health disorder is involved, is to get in the hands of a good psychologist in order to find the remedy as soon as possible.

Bibliographical references:

• Calvo, M.G., García, M.D. (2000). Anxiety and cognition: an integrative framework. Spanish Journal of Motivation and Emotion.
• Langarita-Llorente, R., Gracia-Garcia, P. (2019). Neuropsychology of generalized anxiety disorder: systematic review. Rev. neurol.(Impr. ed.).
• 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.