When Feeling Slow Because of A DisabiltyHas Nothing to Do With Your Actual Speed

You know the feeling. You're reviewing that document for the third time, adjusting your screen settings, working through the details more carefully than your colleagues probably need to. The work gets done-sometimes even ahead of schedule-but it feels harder. It feels like you're working at half-speed while everyone else breezes through.

And because it feels that way, you assume it must be true.

If you have a visual impairment or any accommodation that requires extra cognitive effort, you've probably developed a running narrative: "I'm slower than my colleagues. They must notice. They're probably annoyed, even if they don't say anything."

You fold laundry with meticulous precision. You organize drawers. You engage in detailed household tasks that have clear completion criteria and zero possibility of failure. Meanwhile, the challenging work project sits there, radiating uncertainty.

Here's what makes this so confusing: your manager is supportive. You receive no negative feedback. You even delivered your last major project early with excellent quality ratings.

So why does the worry persist?

Why 'Slower' Doesn't Mean What You Think

When you need workplace accommodations-extra time to review documents, specific software, particular lighting-the logical conclusion seems obvious: these accommodations exist because you're working at a disadvantage. And if you're at a disadvantage, you must be producing less, or slower, or with more effort that everyone can see.

This assumption follows a clean chain of logic:

I need accommodations → I'm different from others → Different means disadvantaged → Disadvantaged means slower → Others can see I'm struggling → They must be annoyed

It feels airtight. It feels like reality.

But there's a critical problem with this logic chain-and it shows up in a fascinating piece of research about how visible we think our internal states actually are.

The Visibility Illusion Nobody Warns You About

Researchers studying what they call "illusory transparency" have discovered something surprising: we systematically overestimate how apparent our internal experiences are to other people.

In study after study, people believe their anxiety, uncertainty, or struggle is obvious to observers. When researchers actually measure what observers notice, the gap is staggering-individuals overestimate the visibility of their internal states by approximately 300 percent.

Think about what this means for a moment.

You're working through a complex task. Internally, you're managing the extra cognitive load of visual processing adaptations. You're aware of every adjustment, every moment of extra effort, every instance where you need to review information differently than someone without your particular vision challenges.

This internal experience is vivid to you. It's consuming mental bandwidth. It feels significant and obvious.

But to your colleagues? They see someone completing their work. They see projects delivered on time or early. They see quality output.

The struggle that feels like a spotlight to you is essentially invisible to them-not because they're not paying attention, but because internal cognitive processes simply don't broadcast themselves the way we assume they do.

The Real Cognitive Load Mechanism

Here's where it gets more interesting. Your brain isn't wrong to notice that certain tasks require more effort. Visual processing differences genuinely do create additional cognitive load. But understanding what your brain does with that information changes everything.

Cognitive scientists have identified that your brain manages mental effort through separate "accounts":

Intrinsic cognitive load: The inherent complexity of the task itself

Extraneous cognitive load: How information is presented or accessed

Germane cognitive load: The mental work of learning and pattern-building

When you have a visual impairment requiring accommodations, you're carrying higher extraneous load-extra mental effort just to access and process information that others receive more directly.

Now here's the mechanism most people miss: when one type of cognitive load is consistently elevated, the brain seeks balance by controlling load in other domains.

This is why the laundry folding becomes compulsively perfect during high work stress periods. Your brain is seeking cognitive equilibrium. It's choosing activities where the extraneous load is minimal, the completion criteria are crystal clear, and the outcome is entirely within your control.

It's not procrastination in the traditional sense. It's sophisticated anxiety management through load balancing.

FMRI studies of people with perfectionist tendencies reveal heightened activity in the anterior cingulate cortex-the brain region involved in error detection and uncertainty processing-when facing ambiguous tasks. Your brain is literally more activated by uncertainty, so it gravitates toward certainty wherever it can find it.

Folding laundry perfectly isn't a character flaw. It's your brain doing exactly what it's designed to do when carrying elevated cognitive load in other areas: seeking relief through controllable, low-ambiguity activities.

The Hidden Problem with Trusting How Things Feel

So if the issue isn't that you're actually slow, and your colleagues can't see your internal struggle the way you think they can, and your brain's preference for controllable tasks is a logical response to cognitive load-what's actually going on?

The real problem is the gap between your internal experience and external reality.

Your brain is making a reasonable inference: "This feels harder than it should → I must be performing worse than others." But this inference is systematically wrong because it's based on comparing internal effort to assumed external results.

Research on workplace self-assessment reveals what psychologists call the performance-perception gap: high-performing employees with anxiety consistently rate their own performance 1.5 to 2 full points lower (on a 5-point scale) than their managers rate them. Low performers, by contrast, tend to rate themselves higher than their managers do.

This isn't about accuracy of self-perception. It's about what you're measuring.

Anxious high performers notice every micro-error, every moment of uncertainty, every instance where something could have been better. They're monitoring themselves intensely, which means they accumulate massive amounts of data about imperfection.

Meanwhile, managers and colleagues are measuring different things: deadlines met, quality of deliverables, contribution to team goals, reliability.

You delivered a project early with excellent quality, but internally experienced the entire process as struggle. Your manager saw: early delivery, excellent quality. You experienced: elevated cognitive load, uncertainty at multiple decision points, awareness of accommodation needs.

Same project. Completely different data sets.

The "slowness" you feel is real-in terms of internal effort expenditure. But it's not translating to actual slowness in measurable performance outcomes. The feeling and the reality have disconnected, but you're treating the feeling as evidence of the reality.

The Performance Assessment Mistake Everyone Makes

When people struggle with performance anxiety, the standard advice focuses on building confidence, managing stress, or developing better time management skills.

But there's a critical element these approaches completely miss: the difference between internal experience and external evidence as data sources.

Most people treat their feelings about their performance as accurate information about their actual performance. This seems intuitive-surely we know how we're doing better than anyone else does?

But when cognitive biases are active (illusory transparency, performance-perception gap, heightened error monitoring), internal feelings become systematically unreliable as performance indicators.

This isn't about "not trusting yourself." It's about understanding that internal feelings and external metrics are measuring different things, and when you're assessing actual performance, external metrics are more reliable.

Think about it this way: if you were teaching someone to drive and they said, "I feel like I'm going too slow," you wouldn't just accept that feeling as truth. You'd look at the speedometer. You'd check if they're keeping pace with traffic. You'd observe whether they're arriving on time.

The feeling of going slow and the reality of going slow are different data points.

Yet with work performance, we often skip the "speedometer check" entirely and trust the feeling alone.

What Happens When You See Both Data Sets

Once you understand these mechanisms-illusory transparency, cognitive load balancing, the performance-perception gap-the entire situation looks different.

That anxiety about colleagues noticing your struggle? They're seeing your output, not your internal experience. The transparency you feel is largely illusion.

The compulsion to fold laundry perfectly instead of tackling the uncertain work task? That's your brain seeking cognitive balance, not evidence of poor work ethic.

The persistent feeling of being slow despite objective evidence to the contrary? That's the performance-perception gap, not accurate self-assessment.

None of this makes the anxiety disappear instantly. But it does something more useful: it reveals that you're solving the wrong problem.

You've been trying to work faster, worry less, and prove your competence. But the actual problem isn't your speed or competence-it's that you're using internal feelings as performance data when those feelings are distorted by known cognitive biases.

How to Track What's Actually Happening

What if, instead of trying to change how work feels, you started tracking what actually happens?

Create what you might call a "Performance Reality Check"-a simple three-column log:

Column 1: Internal Experience
Rate how well you think you performed on key tasks (1-5 scale). Note the anxiety, the sense of struggle, the feeling of slowness. This data is real-it's just not measuring what you think it's measuring.

Column 2: Observable Evidence
Record the external metrics: deadlines met or missed, specific feedback received, tasks completed, quality indicators. This is the data your manager and colleagues are seeing.

Column 3: The Gap
Note the discrepancies. When you rated yourself a 2 but delivered three days early, write that down. When you felt like you were barely keeping up but received positive feedback, document it.

The goal isn't to dismiss your internal experience. It's to see both data sets clearly so you can make decisions based on reality rather than distorted perception.

When you catch yourself gravitating toward productive procrastination-the perfect laundry, the meticulously organized drawer-pause and ask: "What work task am I avoiding, and what specific uncertainty makes it uncomfortable?"

Then, before choosing the comfortable alternative, commit to just 15 minutes with the uncertain task. Not to complete it perfectly. Not even to make significant progress. Just to test what happens to your anxiety when you stay with discomfort briefly.

Track your anxiety level at minute 5, minute 10, and minute 15. Does it escalate the way you predict? Or does something else happen? Are you testing reality, or are you treating predictions as facts?

What Becomes Possible When You Test Reality

When you shift from "I am slow" to "I wonder whether my perception of slowness matches the actual evidence," you move from certainty to investigation.

Certainty keeps you stuck. If you know you're slow, the only option is to somehow become faster-which you can't simply will into existence.

Investigation opens possibilities. If the slowness is perceptual rather than actual, then you're working with cognitive biases that can be identified and accounted for. You can learn to distinguish between effort expenditure and output quality. You can build decision-making frameworks based on evidence rather than feeling.

You can stop spending cognitive resources on anxiety about a problem that may not exist in the form you think it does, and redirect that energy toward actual challenges and meaningful work.

The accommodations you need aren't evidence of inadequacy. They're tools that allow your particular brain to access information effectively. The extra cognitive load is real. But it's not preventing you from performing well-it's just making performance feel different than it does for others.

And that difference between feeling and performing? That's the gap where all your anxiety has been living.

What Nobody Tells You About Why Uncertainty Feels Threatening

You might notice that even with this understanding, the anxiety doesn't simply dissolve. Evidence-based reassurance helps, but it doesn't fully resolve the feeling that uncertainty is threatening.

There's a reason for that-and it goes deeper than workplace performance.

When early life experiences involve loss or unpredictability, the brain's threat detection system gets recalibrated. Ambiguous situations start registering as disproportionately dangerous. The need for control becomes more urgent. The anxiety about disappointing others becomes more central to identity.

You mentioned becoming an only child after your brother's death. You've identified a pattern of people-pleasing-prioritizing others' needs at your own expense.

These aren't separate issues from the workplace anxiety. They're connected through the same underlying mechanism: how your brain learned to process uncertainty and manage the threat of loss.

Understanding why uncertainty feels so threatening in the first place-why your brain developed these elaborate strategies to avoid it-that's the next layer. And it explains why perfect laundry can feel safer than an uncertain work task, even when you consciously know the work task is more important.

The neuroscience of how early experiences reshape threat detection? That's where the real transformation becomes possible.