Anxiety is a common human emotion characterized by feelings of dread, tension, or worry. Working memory is an executive functioning skill that allows you to hold new information in your brain while doing something else. It’s the active process involved in goal-directed behaviors, where you can learn, comprehend, and apply reason to new information.
Anxiety causes your nervous system to go into a state of heightened vigilance where you are anticipating future dangers or difficulties. Being vigilant can make the world around you feel intense and unpredictable, and may cause you to have limited control over your worrying thoughts. Anxiety puts a greater focus on fears, dangers, and threats, which can leave you with less mental space for other information.
As a result, it can negatively impact your cognitive performance and disrupt your working memory. In this article, we will dig deeper into the relationship between anxiety and working memory so you can better understand the relationship between the two.
What is Anxiety?
Anxiety is an emotion that causes feelings of tension, worried thoughts, and physical changes to the body, such as an increased heart rate or sweating. Anxiety is typically considered a future-based response to an unexpected or upcoming stressful situation, such as a presentation at work or an unwanted conflict in your relationships.
It can be a normal reaction to stressful situations and even give you the energy to overcome obstacles and solve problems. However, if you’re struggling with an anxiety disorder, the fear and worry you experience stick around, become overwhelming, and begin to impact your quality of life negatively.
Common Symptoms of Anxiety
- Nervousness
- Restlessness
- Racing thoughts
- Increased heart rate
- Sense of impending doom or danger
- Sweating
- Trembling
- Feeling dizzy, weak, or tired
- Trouble concentrating
- Inability to think about anything but the present worry
- Gastrointestinal problems, such as heartburn or upset stomach
- Panic attacks
- Shortness of breath
- Rumination, or repeatedly returning to worried thoughts
- Sleep issues, such as trouble falling or staying asleep
- Avoidance of places or things that trigger worries

What is Working Memory?
Working memory represents a core cognitive function needed for learning, comprehending, and reasoning. Working memory is your temporary memory storage system that allows you to hold onto new information even when you move on to another task. It is an active workspace in your brain that’s constantly processing and applying information so that you can adapt to your environment in purposeful ways.
Working memory is different than short-term memory, which only sticks around for a few seconds or minutes, and long-term memory, which is a relatively permanent storage of memories. Working memory is active. It helps you remember and apply new information even when doing something else. It enables you to do things like follow the steps for a recipe or dial a phone number as it is told to you.
Working Memory Examples
- Doing mental math
- Recalling the earlier part of a statement to understand the later part
- Remembering where an object was just seen
- Keeping an address in mind while being given directions
- Keeping a story in sequential order before a person completes telling it
- Dialing a phone number you were just told
- Calculating the total bill of groceries as you’re shopping
- Following instructions for assembling furniture
- Comprehending what you’re reading
- Keeping multiple concepts in mind so you can combine them later
Anxiety and Working Memory
Anxiety causes a heightened state of vigilance, which is when your autonomic nervous system becomes hyperaware and alert. This is always known as fight-or-flight mode. The fight-or-flight response floods your body with adrenaline and cortisol, often resulting in physical symptoms such as sweating, racing heart rate, and shortness of breath.
When you’re in this anxious state, you have less control over your thoughts because your body is trying to keep you safe by constantly preparing for future threats or dangers. For this reason, anxiety causes you to focus on negative stimuli. A focus on negative stimuli causes a flood of worrying thoughts about situations that cause feelings of uncertainty.
Research shows that worrying thoughts and focusing on negative stimuli impair the cognitive performance of working memory. These impairments appear in all three subcategories of working memory, including your verbal working memory, visual-spatial memory, and attention control system. Struggles with working memory can lead to trouble completing daily tasks and hinder your ability to perform well at work or concentrate on a project.

Let’s look at how anxiety impacts each subcomponent of working memory.
Verbal Working Memory (Phonological Loop)
Your verbal working memory, or phonological loop, processes and stores verbal and auditory information. It is an essential part of language processing and communication. However, anxiety can make it more difficult to access your phonological loop, leading to struggles with learning new words, remembering or understanding what you’ve read, or following a story.
The Visual-Spatial Working Memory (Visuospatial Sketchpad)
The visual-spatial working memory, also known as your visuospatial sketchpad, stores and processes mental images and spatial relationships. It is helpful when you have to remember where you parked your car, your office layout, or the details of a photo. However, anxiety can preoccupy your thoughts and impair your visual-spatial working memory. This can result in you getting lost easily, forgetting to exit the highway in time, or constantly bumping into things.
Attention Control System (Central Executive Functioning)
Your attention control system is responsible for your executive functioning skills. Executive functioning refers to your ability to focus, stay on task, and avoid distractions. Your executive functioning coordinates your verbal and visual-spatial working memories, making it possible to sequence tasks you need to complete, plan, and make decisions. Anxiety can lead to struggles with executive functioning, resulting in an inability to block out irrelevant thoughts so that you can stay on task. This can look like getting so caught up in worries about the future that you can’t concentrate at work or keep forgetting appointments.
Therapy for Anxiety
If you recognize yourself in this content, know you’re not alone. Many people who struggle with anxiety find that it impacts their working memory. By working with a therapist, you can explore the unique ways you’re struggling and build new insights that can lead you toward change.
Thrive for the People has a team of therapists with extensive experience and knowledge of treating anxiety disorders. We would love to help. You can schedule a free consultation call so we can get to know you better and see if we’d be a good support for your journey.