We all suffer from anxiety at some point, but new research has found being anxious can actually mess up your judgment.
The study, published in the journal Cell Press discovered that people who suffer from anxiety are less able to tell the difference between unthreatening things and those that are associated with a threat. Instead, they showed a phenomenon called overgeneralization, in which a person thinks that one thing that happens creates a rule (like struggling to meet a work deadline means you're a bad employee).
For the study, researchers trained people with and without anxiety to associate three different tones with one of three outcomes: losing money, gaining money, or having nothing at all change. Then, they played one of 15 tones for participants and asked them if they'd heard it before. If they were right, they'd get money. If they were wrong, they'd lose money.
While it made sense to assume you hadn't heard the tone before unless you were sure, scientists found that those with anxiety were more likely than people who didn't have anxiety to think that they'd heard the sound in training. Essentially, they were more likely to associate the tone with losing or gaining money, and to take a gamble because of it.
Brain scans of the participants showed differences as well. People who were anxious had more activity in the amygdala, the area of the brain associated with fear and anxiety, than those who weren't naturally anxious.
What's going on here? "Sometimes our anxiety response can get overwhelmed," explains licensed clinical psychologist Alicia H. Clark, Psy.D. "It can be hard for anxious people to distinguish between situations that are stressful, or uncomfortable, and those that are truly dangerous."
As a result, an anxious person can feel overwhelmed and even lose confidence in their ability to accurately read a situation, leading to more bad decisions. "It is easy to lose confidence in your judgment when everything feels overwhelming," says Clark.
If you tend to run a little high on the anxiety scale, Clark says you can work to keep it from clouding your judgment. Her recommendation: Keep in mind that you can handle a stressful situation and the anxiety that comes with it. "How you think about anxiety is fundamental to how you can handle anxiety," she says.
Instead, she recommends embracing anxiety as a positive thing and a way to motivate yourself. If you can achieve that, your good judgment will follow. "If you don't fight with or resist it, you will be much more like to access its positive energy," she says. "Anxiety is not in itself bad, but how we perceive it can be."
