Anxiety and Depression - Lower IQ

Does anxiety and depression affect your IQ?

Anxiety Question:

Does anxiety and depression affect your IQ?
Mine used to be higher, I think.

Anxiety Answer:

IQ is a measurement of intelligence.

Anxiety and depression does not make you less intelligent.

However, it can affect your ability to use your intelligence as you did before.

Depression or being anxious can affect your ability to concentrate. In that way you may not be able to recall or may have difficulty recalling information stored in your brain. It's not that the information isn't there; you just have trouble finding it.

It's like saving a photo to your computer, you have to know where it is or you will have to go through a search process to find it.
Your brain can work the same way.

Anxiety and depression are not the only problems to cause this.

Lack of sleep, information overload and worry over a specific concern are just a few other things that can affect memory and concentration.

Once the depression, anxiety or whatever is gone then you will be back to "normal". Your IQ never changed, just your ability to use it.

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Dealing with Anxiety Advice

Practice Meditation To Conquer The Madness

"I practice meditation myself every day and have done so for decades. I'm at a stage where I couldn't' survive without my half hour of "alone time" or recharging time." I do recommend that you build meditation into your life - even if you never knew one episode of panic and if your anxiety levels are fine. It helps to counter the 21st century madness of constant noise, information overload, impossible deadlines and dinners being burnt."

From the book titled "Calming Words" by Dr. Jeannette Kavanagh