Anxiety and Decision Making

Mental illnesses impact one in four people in their lives according to the World Health Organization. 25% of the world’s population will suffer from a mental or neurological disorder at some point in their lives. Living with a mental disorder is a constant battle. The most common mental disorder is anxiety, affecting over 40 million adults in the United States (Facts & Statistics). Out of those 40 million people, only approximately 37% receive treatment (Facts & Statistics).

As someone that suffers from anxiety, simple tasks and decisions end up being much more troubling than they should be. Anxiety is such a prominent part of my life, it impacts the decisions I make on a daily basis. Negative thoughts and worries invade my head, spiraling to the point of physical pain. Anxiety prevents me from having a calm, clear mind.

There have been many studies that research the impact of anxiety on the brain and its effect on decision-making. According to The Journal of Neuroscience, “anxiety suppresses the general spontaneous activity of prefrontal cortex (PFC) neurons, as well as significantly weakening the encoding of task rules by dorsomedial PFC Neurons (Bergland) Multiple studies, including this one, conclude that anxiety disrupts the decision-making process, ultimately leading to more bad decisions.

Anxiety tends to shift behavior to the safer option, but is it not always the best way to go. It fills my head with distractions. Whether it is from the environment or my own thoughts and worries, it is extremely difficult to ignore these distractions. Anxiety interrupts the brain’s capacity to ignore distractions by desensitizing neurons in the prefrontal cortex that are essential in decision making (Young). The power of anxiety can lead to extreme difficulties with filtering out irrelevant information.

If anxiety impairs decision-making, how does it impact the network of high-level control areas that encode our decisions before they enter our awareness?

Looking at the essay “Unconscious Determinates of Free Decisions in the Human Brain,” it was found that the outcome of a decision can be encoded in the brain up to 10 seconds before it enters awareness (Soon). This experiment was done only with simple, stress free decisions instead of an anxiety induced situation. In this study, the researchers were able to “identify whether any leading brain activity selectively predicted the outcome of the subject’s choice.” The weakening of neuronal activity in the PFC inclines me to wonder how a stressor would impact this process. It was found that the frontopolar cortex is where the decision is made and the precuneus is associated in the storage of the decision (Soon). Hopefully, in the future this experiment will been replicated in a way that involves different types of decisions under different circumstances in order to have a more complex understanding of the brain in everyday life rather than the basic simulation in the original experiment.

Does anxiety interfere with the neuronal processing that is occurring before awareness? How does a stressor impact ‘free will’?

I imagine that anxiety would decreases the time between the brain encoding a decision and the decision entering awareness because it suppresses neurons and leads to more bad decisions. This makes me think that a brain affected by anxiety has a shorter processing time for decisions but an increase in the worries and thoughts surrounding the decision.  

I am curious to see what other research has been done and what research will be done on this topic. What can be done to increase the understanding of how much anxiety takes over someone's brain?

Works Cited

Bergland, Christopher. "How Does Anxiety Short Circuit the Decision-Making Process?" Psychology Today. Sussex Publishers, 17 Mar. 2016. Web.

"Facts & Statistics." Anxiety and Depression Association of America, ADAA. N.p., Aug. 2017. Web.

Park, Junchol, Jesse Wood, Corina Bondi, Alberto Del Arco, and Bita Moghaddam. "Anxiety Evokes Hypofrontality and Disrupts Rule-Relevant Encoding by Dorsomedial Prefrontal Cortex Neurons." Journal of Neuroscience. Society for Neuroscience, 16 Mar. 2016. Web.

Soon, Chun Siong, Marcel Brass, Hans-Jochen Heinze, and John-Dylan Haynes. "Unconscious Determinants of Free Decisions in the Human Brain." Nature Neuroscience 11.5 (2008): 543-45. Web.

WHO. "Mental Disorders Affect One in Four People." WHO. World Health Organization, n.d. Web.

Young, Karen. "How Anxiety Interferes With Decision-Making." Hey Sigmund. N.p., 10 Apr. 2016. Web.