Why Stress Makes It Hard to Connect the Dots

Brown University psychiatrist and addiction researcher Dr. Jud Brewer (author of Unwinding Anxiety) walks through a new brain-imaging study that pinpoints exactly the kind of learning stress pulls apart — relational learning, the ability to connect seemingly unrelated pieces of information into a coherent picture. He argues this is part of why anxiety gets stuck: stress narrows attention, prevents the brain from forming the wider associative networks that produce insight, and locks people into the same shrinking loops they're trying to think their way out of.