Do other people feel their cognitive abilities diminishing as they age?
I've been diagnosed with major depressive disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, ADHD-Inattentive type, and probably other things that I can't remember right now. I think most of these diagnoses (panic disorder being the only viscerally clear one) are to explain the disparity between my IQ scores throughout the years and my lack of performance in school and life in general. Which, by the way, I know is the dead-horse of tropes for internet comments...
As a result of these diagnoses I've taken several classes of medications and several instances within each class.
I feel like there is a very complex matrix of factors that have contributed to the way I am now (I used to be a pretty normal, social, outgoing, intelligent, excited kid who got bad grades, now I'm kind of a weird dude) and I can't determine the cause. If the cause is depression, I'd like to take the right medication to help with that. If the cause is medication, I'd like to stop taking medication. If this 'slowing down' feeling is something other people my age (25) feel, then maybe I don't need to make a big deal about it. The way the author described his neurotypical self reminds me of who I was 13 years ago before that first diagnosis and that first prescription. I want to feel that clarity again.
Right now I feel like I'm brute-forcing through life. And it's working. But I feel about 1/10th the joy/passion I had when I was a kid. Which is a symptom of depression. So I take drugs. That make me feel slow, and prevent me from being deeply depressed. Which might not even happen. I am stuck in a strange loop, but slowly mining my way out.
At 29 I've also become somewhat paranoid about age-related cognitive decline. From what little I've looked into it, to the extent you go by the fluid and crystallized intelligence dichotomy, fluid tends to peak at around 25 and crystallized peaks somewhere in the 35-55 range (I've heard multiple numbers from different sources), with major decline beginning around 65. Brain mass also peaks around 25 and loses around 2 grams per year thereafter. The intelligence loss seems to be exponential with age - you'll drop a lot faster between 60 and 70 than you will between 30 and 40. The different peaks for fluid versus crystallized probably affect life outcomes differently depending on lifestyle and profession, e.g. the saying I used to hear from my physics professors that "If you haven't done anything by 30, you never will," or the Primer quote, "What they do with engineers when they turn 40? They take them out back and shoot 'em." On the other hand fields requiring vast recall of domain knowledge like law or medicine probably favor the older crowd that have had decades more time to accumulate, even if they lack the high-level abstract problem solving stuff required more in e.g. physics or math.
I believe my cognitive ability has generally remained constant since 15 or so (I'm going on 30 now). However, my experiences and knowledge have networked together such that I am very confident I could drub 15-year-old me at any given intellectual task.
I've been diagnosed with major depressive disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, ADHD-Inattentive type, and probably other things that I can't remember right now. I think most of these diagnoses (panic disorder being the only viscerally clear one) are to explain the disparity between my IQ scores throughout the years and my lack of performance in school and life in general. Which, by the way, I know is the dead-horse of tropes for internet comments...
As a result of these diagnoses I've taken several classes of medications and several instances within each class.
SSRI/(S)NRIs: Prozac, Cymbalta, Lexapro, Wellbutrin, Strattera, probably others
Stimulants: Adderall (XR), Ritalin
Benzodiazepines: Klonopin, Xanax, Ativan
Weird hypnotic sleep drugs: Ambien, Lunesta
I feel like there is a very complex matrix of factors that have contributed to the way I am now (I used to be a pretty normal, social, outgoing, intelligent, excited kid who got bad grades, now I'm kind of a weird dude) and I can't determine the cause. If the cause is depression, I'd like to take the right medication to help with that. If the cause is medication, I'd like to stop taking medication. If this 'slowing down' feeling is something other people my age (25) feel, then maybe I don't need to make a big deal about it. The way the author described his neurotypical self reminds me of who I was 13 years ago before that first diagnosis and that first prescription. I want to feel that clarity again.
Right now I feel like I'm brute-forcing through life. And it's working. But I feel about 1/10th the joy/passion I had when I was a kid. Which is a symptom of depression. So I take drugs. That make me feel slow, and prevent me from being deeply depressed. Which might not even happen. I am stuck in a strange loop, but slowly mining my way out.