>In the face of extreme anxiety, I literally become stupid.
You don't need to experience "extreme anxiety", or even have a diagnosis, to experience this effect. Most people that are just learning how to drive a car will at some point experience how acute stress causes you to fail even the most basic tasks, things you would never predict that you would fail doing before you actually do. When I was learning how to drive, I repeatedly forgot checking the rear view mirror before switching lanes (even though I knew this was extremely important), because I was so focused on manual gear shifting. I would switch to the wrong gear or forget turning the turn indicator off, because my stressed mind would filter out the noise of the indicator blinking.
Some even believe that the "experience of driving" in itself is detrimental, and that "each exposure elicits an acute stress response, and that repeated exposures may act as a chronic stressor".[1]
I failed my first driving test for similar reasons! In fact, driving is the elephant in the room when it comes to common stressful activities. Even if you follow the rules, not everyone else will and you always need to be ready. In addition, the stakes are high... Lifetime odds of dying in a car crash are 1/102 (source: https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/all-injuries/preventable-death-o...)
This is the exact reason I failed my driving test 7 times before finally passing (pass rate in UK is ~60%). It's hard to describe to people that it's not that you're necessarily bad at the task, just the anxiety causes you to react in a bad way.
I experienced this quite viscerally in my last job, where I had roughly a 40 minute commute in heavy traffic each way. On the surface, it sounds like nothing, but I feared for my safety every time and it worsened with each passing month.
There were several reasons I left the job, but this was at least 30% of it and I can tell you it significantly improved my mental health. For a while I had anxiety every time I had to drive, and it started well before I ever got in the car. A couple years later, I was able to handle several very long road trips and even did a stint as a rideshare driver with almost no issues-- the anxiety is pretty much gone now, it was nearly all due to that commute.
I worry that a lot of mental health issues are essentially situational and that we (as a society) put all sorts of barricades in place that make it difficult for people to shift their overall situations (the thing that will likely most benefit them).
You don't need to experience "extreme anxiety", or even have a diagnosis, to experience this effect. Most people that are just learning how to drive a car will at some point experience how acute stress causes you to fail even the most basic tasks, things you would never predict that you would fail doing before you actually do. When I was learning how to drive, I repeatedly forgot checking the rear view mirror before switching lanes (even though I knew this was extremely important), because I was so focused on manual gear shifting. I would switch to the wrong gear or forget turning the turn indicator off, because my stressed mind would filter out the noise of the indicator blinking.
Some even believe that the "experience of driving" in itself is detrimental, and that "each exposure elicits an acute stress response, and that repeated exposures may act as a chronic stressor".[1]
[1]: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...