Article 1: Why We Don’t Always Have Access to Our Best Thinking
- selfstructuredlivi
- Mar 18
- 1 min read
Updated: Mar 19
Understanding why clarity comes and goes
Most people have experienced something like this. At one moment, thinking feels clear. You can organise your thoughts, make decisions, and respond calmly. Later, a small situation feels overwhelming. Focus drops, reactions become quicker, and it becomes harder to think through what is happening.
Nothing about your ability has changed. What has changed is access.
Across daily life, the ability to think, reflect, and regulate behaviour is not fixed. These capacities shift depending on stress, fatigue, emotional activation, and the demands placed on the system.
Research on executive functions indicates that processes such as attention, inhibition, and working memory depend on regulatory conditions within the nervous system (Barkley, 2012; Diamond, 2013).
When regulation is stable, these functions are more accessible. When the system is under load, access can temporarily decrease.
As a result, behaviour does not always reflect intention or capability. In many situations, it reflects the level of cognitive access available at that moment.
Instead of asking only why something happened, a more useful question is:
What level of cognitive access was available in that moment?
References
Barkley, R. A. (2012). Executive functions: What they are, how they work, and why they evolved. Guilford Press.
Diamond, A. (2013). Executive functions. Annual Review of Psychology, 64, 135–168.
https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-113011-143750