Does depression affect your decision-making?
Studies have found that people with depression often make decisions specifically to avoid anxiety. People with depression often feel hopeless and as a result, don’t want to waste energy on plans they believe won’t work. This leads to less information gathering, less idea generation, and less thinking through options.
Can depression affect your thinking?
It can impair your attention and memory, as well as your information processing and decision-making skills. It can also lower your cognitive flexibility (the ability to adapt your goals and strategies to changing situations) and executive functioning (the ability to take all the steps to get something done).
Why does depression make me indecisive?
One reason people with depression may be indecisive is that they lack motivation. Motivation is impaired in depression and without it, the rewards of making a decision are reduced. This may account for the slowness in decision-making as well. Impaired decision-making in depression is thought to be a physical problem.
Does anxiety affect decision-making?
Decision-making happens in the pre-frontal cortex – the front part of your brain. According to research published in The Journal of Neuroscience (2016), anxiety decreases activity in this area. Basically, anxiety slows down and disengages the specific part of your brain that you need to make good decisions.
Is depression something ashamed of?
Depression often comes with feelings of embarrassment and shame. Sometimes these feelings come from ourselves; sometimes they’re put on us by other people. Unfortunately, some stigma surrounding mental illness remains. But we shouldn’t have to feel ashamed.
Do antidepressants affect intelligence?
Fluoxetine is a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor or SSRI, which causes an increase in levels of serotonin in the brain. There are suggestions that SSRIs may impair cognitive function such as thinking, memory and concentration as well as affecting behavioural function.