When you 'go blank', it's usually because you are talking too quickly – thoughts are coming out of your mouth as soon as they are produced. When this is happening, your pace is too fast for you and your audience.
The biggest reason our minds go blank in social situation is because we're anxious or nervous and are putting too much pressure on ourselves. It is part of our autonomic nervous system that causes it. When your mind cannot process the present influx of information, we become nervous and our mind goes blank.
In other words, mind blanking is a normal neurocognitive phenomenon. Mind blanking can occur spontaneously (without clear reason) or when the brain is overloaded. In either case, performance is not necessarily affected in an adverse way (1). In other words, mind blanking doesn't have to be disastrous.
Mind blanking is a distinct mental state linked to a recurrent brain profile of globally positive connectivity during ongoing mentation.
Anxiety brain fog happens when a person feels anxious and has difficulty concentrating or thinking clearly. Many conditions may cause anxiety and brain fog, including mental health diagnoses and physical illnesses. It is normal to experience occasional brain fog and anxiety, especially during high stress.
When people feel so self-conscious and anxious that it prevents them from speaking up or socializing most of the time, it's probably more than shyness. It may be a mental health problem known as social anxiety (also called social phobia).
It happens when you try to tell your brain what to do, but your brain doesnt listen. For people with ADHD, with the executive functioning impairments that come with the condition, our brains habitually refuse to follow orders.
It's due to something called the 'fight or flight' response. The feeling of your mind going blank under stress happens when hormones, such as cortisol, flood our systems.
Passing feelings of depersonalization or derealization are common and aren't necessarily a cause for concern. But ongoing or severe feelings of detachment and distortion of your surroundings can be a sign of depersonalization-derealization disorder or another physical or mental health disorder.
Like many innate reactions we humans experience day-to-day, the 'mind blank' is actually one of the age-old fight-or-flight mechanisms we developed to survive; based on feelings of anxiety, the brain attempts to shield itself from the situation it's currently facing, in order to mitigate the stress said situation is ...
When you 'go blank', it's usually because you are talking too quickly – thoughts are coming out of your mouth as soon as they are produced. When this is happening, your pace is too fast for you and your audience.
This mental state—mind-blanking—may represent an extreme decoupling of perception and attention, one in which attention fails to bring any stimuli into conscious awareness.
Signs & Symptoms
Sleep or appetite changes — Dramatic sleep and appetite changes or decline in personal care. Mood changes — Rapid or dramatic shifts in emotions or depressed feelings, greater irritability. Withdrawal — Recent social withdrawal and loss of interest in activities previously enjoyed.
Everyone spaces out from time to time. While spacing out can simply be a sign that you are sleep deprived, stressed, or distracted, it can also be due to a transient ischemic attack, seizure, hypotension, hypoglycemia, migraine, transient global amnesia, fatigue, narcolepsy, or drug misuse.
Thought blocking occurs when someone is talking and suddenly stops for no clear reason. Losing one's train of thought now and then is common and not usually anything to worry about. However, it can also be a symptom of a mental health condition such as psychosis.
The mind of a person with ADHD is full of the minutiae of life (“Where are my keys?” “Where did I park the car?”), so there is little room left for new thoughts and memories. Something has to be discarded or forgotten to make room for new information. Often the information individuals with ADHD need is in their memory…
People with ADHD will have at least two or three of the following challenges: difficulty staying on task, paying attention, daydreaming or tuning out, organizational issues, and hyper-focus, which causes us to lose track of time. ADHD-ers are often highly sensitive and empathic.
Differences in emotions in people with ADHD can lead to 'shutdowns', where someone is so overwhelmed with emotions that they space out, may find it hard to speak or move and may struggle to articulate what they are feeling until they can process their emotions.
Social anxiety is a result of the fear of a possibility that we will not be accepted by our peers. It's the fear of negative evaluation by others, and that is [part of] a very fundamental, biological need to be liked. That's why we have social anxiety.
Freeze is one of several defense responses to trauma. While the survival strategies fight and flight are more well-known, the freeze response has become increasingly identified and worked with over the past several years.
Learn deep breathing exercises; incoporate them into your life as a way to stabilize and maintain a sense of inner calm; at the moment of blank brain, take a long, deep breath, relax, collect your thoughts, and allow your memory to do it's job before anxiety sets in.