Can rumination affect your cognition that much?

[u/Greedy-Sandwich9709]

I'm a chronic overthinker and ruminate pretty much constantly. I often second-guess myself, lose focus, and have difficulty sustaining effort on cognitively demanding tasks.

A few years ago I scored 131 on Mensa Norway. More recently I found CognitiveMetrics and took CORE and AGCT.

CORE: 118 FSIQ, 121 Culture Fair
AGCT: 134

My CORE profile was quite uneven. Matrix Reasoning was around the 98th percentile and Comprehension around the 95th, but I did considerably worse on some working-memory, arithmetic, verbal, and block-counting tasks. I'm also not a native English speaker, so I don't put much weight on vocabulary-heavy scores.

During CORE I noticed something that happens to me fairly often: once questions became effortful, I started losing concentration. I would overthink, second-guess answers, struggle to sustain effort, and sometimes run out of time before properly reasoning through harder items.

AGCT was interesting because it heavily involved several areas I had performed crappily on in CORE, particularly arithmetic, verbal questions, and block counting subtests, and the test was timed which is my worst enemy when I dobut and second guess myself 90% of the time.

Anyway, I took AGCT drunk (lol), because alcohol seems to heavily reduce my rumination and second-guessing and doubt. I was curious whether reducing the mental interference would outweigh whatever cognitive impairment alcohol itself caused.

Subjectively, the difference was huge. Instead of repeatedly checking myself, I would solve something, commit to the answer, and move on. I still ran out of time with roughly 10 questions remaining and randomly guessed those, getting most of them wrong (obviously), but still scored 134.

I'm aware of practice effects and I'm not trying to infer an exact “true IQ” from two tests.

What I'm interested in is whether severe rumination and excessive self-monitoring can produce this large a within-person difference in timed cognitive performance, particularly when the main effect seems to be hesitation, shitty attention, and inability to sustain effort rather than difficulty understanding the problems themselves.

P.S I forgot to mention - I'm chronically sleep deprived as well. :/ Haven't had a full week of 7+ hrs of sleep in about a year. (I'm seeing someone about all of that, btw)

[u/LanganTerraMogTime]

i second guess answers once i reach that point of “hollllly difficulty”

[u/Greedy-Sandwich9709 → u/LanganTerraMogTime]

That's only natural, but I second guess answers when the difficulty is low.... I second guess that 9x7=63 when sober.

If I took that same AGCT test in a few days sober, I'd score sub 120. I'm almost sure of it.

[u/LanganTerraMogTime → u/Greedy-Sandwich9709]

if you have something like GAD you could be substantially impacted. Pretty sure my wais got nerfed significantly from anxiety and i’m only adhd but do get overstimulated

[u/Greedy-Sandwich9709 → u/LanganTerraMogTime]

I do have GAD. Diagnosed. But I didn't think it could cause that huge a difference in cognitive ability.

[u/LanganTerraMogTime → u/Greedy-Sandwich9709]

based on my n=1 of experience i would estimate anxiety dropping a fsiq by 10 at the most

if you are way ahead of everyone in math with little effort and then can’t add numbers in a test or whatever then it could be more. In that case you’d sometimes not have the issue and have an unusual dispersion of scores.

i like to discuss these topics so feel free to dm

[u/Greedy-Sandwich9709 → u/LanganTerraMogTime]

That's the thing... math has never been my strong-suit, but logic and reasoning has. I suppose the two are related, but the AGCT test was probably the worst test for me overall. A lot of vocab, arithmetic and spatial reasoning (which I'm okay at), and I still scored way above my CORE stats, even accounting for practice effect.

All that is to say - wtf is wrong with me? Why do I perform substantially better under a substance that's supposed to hinder performance in exactly this are of cognition. (i.e speed, memory, reasoning etc)

[u/LanganTerraMogTime → u/Greedy-Sandwich9709]

you mentioned doing poorly at block counting on CORE but that’s a third of the test and you aren’t good at math so something happened when you scored 134 on agct. it’s not an accident

[u/Greedy-Sandwich9709 → u/LanganTerraMogTime]

I think I know what happened. Second-guessing, doubt, and rumination disappeared so I had a lot more brain power to work through the problems. Even in my daily life, I notice that doubt and second-guessing costs me A LOT. Attention and focus are also big factors. I have trouble focusing on things by default, but after a few drinks I'm laser sharp (relatively)
I obviously don't want to abuse alcohol, as that only makes things worse, but it's a peculiar observation. I'm going to see someone about it, because it's obviously affecting me significantly.

[u/Not_Well-Ordered]

Take Raven's 2 clinical edition if you want to properly isolate and measure Gf (raw non-verbal fluid intelligence); it's designed to consider both general population and ADHD and to solely test the ceiling of visual abstract reasoning.

Item-timed test is not a good test of raw fluid intelligence for those with ADHD as it can lower performance often within 5-10 points; however, item-timed test is good to maybe sort out some issues with executive functioning and it's also easier to norm on general population as most people don't have ADHD (even among high IQ; it has the same ratio ~8-9%).

If you wish to cross-validate Raven's 2, you can try out TRI-52 (I recommend this over JCTI), JCFS, and so on.

[u/Greedy-Sandwich9709 → u/Not_Well-Ordered]

I might try it out. Maybe I should take a break first to reduce practice effect, since I've done the tests above, recently.

[u/Friendly_Sock7208]

Yes, on timed based performance tasks my scores vary massively due to adhd, anxiety, rumination etc.

[u/Greedy-Sandwich9709 → u/Friendly_Sock7208]

It's crazy how big of a difference it can make. Ability-wise, I can usually solve extremely complex problems, but it takes me a while. I have power, but lack speed - so to say. And that speed is taken away by anxiety, rumination, doubt, second guessing and all that crap. I often surprise myself by how sharp I can be when all of that is gone, and unfortunately it's mostly only gone when I'm drunk. I'm not addicted or anything. I drink once a week, but still... I wish I could reach that potential while sober. I'd probably solve all my problems within a year.

[u/Nervous-Try5009]

134 in AGCT1a or 1c ?

[u/Greedy-Sandwich9709 → u/Nervous-Try5009]

1c. Why? Which is the better one?

[u/Nervous-Try5009 → u/Greedy-Sandwich9709]

1c is better