# Why does anxiety (?) make me dumb?

Something about anxiety and my brain shutting off.

Disclaimer: I’m grappling with something I hardly understand at all, and I’m not all that used to the exercise.

One of our goals here is to improve our thinking. That’s fairly obvious. And I have another obvious statement: The process of thinking, in its context, is the following (NB: this description helps me make my point clearly, but may or may not be accurate beyond what is needed for that purpose): First, I understand the content of a statement, the concept being described. Then I judge the value of this concept, I give myself the trouble of doing something to it before tossing it into either of the ‘true’ or ‘false’ buckets. Then, I twist it, mix it with the rest of my worldview, I apply it in my life rather than forgetting it. And, if possible, I try to improve upon it, and come up with a better concept. Which I then share with others, wash, rinse, repeat.

What would you say if I told you I’m stuck at the first step, the one that goes ‘understand the content of the statement’?

Because I feel like I’m indeed stuck there, and it seems very related to the weird things my mental health has been doing lately.

You may say that it’s just what normal life feels like: I’m not outstandingly smart by any means, and most not outstandingly smart people live all their lives without a thought of their own, mostly just learning facts and rules, and spitting them out again when they are needed. Besides, it’s not even like I *want* to be a deep thinker full of original ideas, or to dramatically change the world. (Might be fun if I could, though, I guess).

And yet. As I’ve said, most people don’t seem to go much further than ‘apply knowledge to daily life’ ; and most people aren’t rational enough to have given much thought to their process for rejecting or accepting ideas into their worldview. Yet I think I’m on an even lower rung than that, where I have no trouble understanding reasonably complex concepts, but just never will discuss them, think about them, or even apply them. It feels like everything I learn enters through one ear and comes out at the other end, without having been actually processed by my brain. 

The reason I worry about this is that it has quite large impacts on my life. Even my (ultimately misguided) choice of a degree, after high school, went more or less thus: "No, not that: I love to read textbooks on that topic, but if I do it as my job, I will have to come up with new ideas in that field, or new clever ways to use those concepts, and I don’t normally do that. I’m a walking encyclopedia, not a smart engineer". High school itself, of course, was great for this: a lot of cool stuff to understand and factoids to gather, but the only thinking to be done was done at the teacher’s command. Anyway, my issue’s not improved since, and may have gotten worse. A few years later, when I felt the need to improve myself, I would think "Why do I have this or that problem?", but every "What can I do to solve it?" was dismissed sometimes even before becoming a conscious thought, as if I didn’t dare to act upon my own self. And it’s like that all the time!

The main question I’m asking here is the one about which you probably have an answer on your mind right now: why can’t I dare to think? *Sapere aude* seems simple enough to implement when one learns about it, and most people manage at least to pretend doing it sometimes… so why can’t I seem to make the tiniest step toward doing it? And we’re probably thinking of the same potential answers: most likely it’s because I’m anxious. Or because of ADHD impairing my executive functioning. Or because of some grim psychological avoidance disorder. Or because I used to be depressed. Or because I’m autistic and accept things at face value rather than being a contrarian. Or maybe everyone really is like that and I’m just complaining that I’m a human being. Another quite likely option is that I’m viewing the whole problem through the wrong lens. Anyway, I’m curious what you think.

But the second point is actually the reason why I’m asking that here, which is because of another question I have: "Thinking", "Daring to think" is, like, level zero of rationality. And yet, I can’t seem to find any resources on LW on how to do that crucial first step. Any clues where I can find advice on this? How do I start thinking for myself?