Everyone can relate to feeling scatterbrained in times of stress. When anxiety is present, you may misplace your keys or forget where you parked your car. If scenarios like this are uncommon and have an obvious cause, they’re rarely cause for concern. However, people dealing with an anxiety disorder can struggle with chronic memory issues.
Such issues could be ongoing versions of the problems mentioned above. However, left unchecked, anxiety can even impact a person enough to create false memories. This combination can add up to cause misconceptions about themselves and their own past.
The Traps of Anxious Thought Patterns
A hallmark of anxiety disorders is the distressing negative spiral. To follow are four common ways anxiety can alter our thinking. Such distortions — alone or in tandem — have the potential to lay the groundwork for long-term false memories to form:
All-of-Nothing Thinking: Also known as black-and-white thinking, this thought pattern is devoid of nuance or context.
Generalizing: If an anxious person has a negative experience, they tend to over-generalize that all similar situations will go the same way.
Worst-Case Scenarios: In every instance, your brain defaults to envision the worst possible outcomes.
Playing Psychic: This trend can range from thinking you can read the minds of people around you — almost always to your own detriment.
With anxious thought patterns laying the foundation, it is remarkably easy to begin shifting into distorted memories.
Two Big Ways How Anxiety Can Effect Our Memories
1. Sleep Disturbances
An anxious person is far more likely to struggle with their sleep routine. About 7 out of 10 people with generalized anxiety disorder report unhealthy sleep patterns negatively impacting their lives. This is bad enough on its own but it can also affect your memory skills in two major ways:
Less sleep causes less focus which, in turn, impairs a person’s ability to properly process and store experiences.
As you sleep, your memories are stored as efficiently as possible. If an anxiety disorder interrupts your sleep, it also interrupts memory consolidation.
2. Increased Cortisol Levels
Anxiety is typically greeted by the release of a street hormone called cortisol. It helps prepare your mind and body to handle a dangerous situation. Once the threat has lessened, so does the stress response. When anxiety becomes ongoing, you can remain in a state of high alert and thus, chronically higher cortisol levels. Long-term cortisol exposure has a very detrimental impact on your brain and this includes fragmented and faulty memories.
How Does All This Translate Into False Memories and Misconceptions of the Past?
Poorly stored information is confusing to your brain. Therefore, you will unconsciously add more details to your memories to give them some credibility. You make associations between people, places, and things with events that are not fully true or false. Over time, some past experiences become cemented in your mind in these new, enhanced versions.
In a desperate attempt to address the feeling of being at risk (even when no threat is present), your mind smooths out fragmented memories and you prefer these more “rational” perceptions. They usually present you in a better light and who doesn’t like that? The memories get reinforced and can become viewed as an accurate chapter in your life.
Now What?
It’s important to note that the liar in this equation is anxiety. People aren’t knowingly rewriting their life. Rather, the unconscious impact of an anxiety disorder is revising the past in the name of soothing fear. As a result, the big first step is to begin getting treatment for the underlying anxiety disorder. To read more please click on anxiety therapy. If any of this sounds familiar, let’s connect and talk soon.