Sometimes words have no attached meaning..

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I just really figured out a way to describe something I experience sometimes that is quite frusterating to my counsellor and Im just curious if anyone else here experiences this.

It happens both with written and spoken language. I used to experience this in school, now I experience it at work, but basically when I feel pressure to do a task while being observed I often lose my ability to understand what Im hearing or reading. If I am trying to read a simple sentence I see the words but they appear to have no attached meaning and no matter how much I break the sentence up and how slowly I try to read it it seems impossible to understand. If someone is asking me to do something or asking if I understand something I can hear what they are saying but I can't understand what they are trying to say.

In school on all of my report cards I would get comments about how I wouldn't use my time wisely because I would run into this problem often when we were supposed to be working on homework in class and the teacher would be walking around in class making sure we were getting our work done. I would save all of my homework until I got home and make excuses about why I wasn't getting anything done because I didn't really understand why I wasn't. Now at work I end up staying late because I am unable to work for the beginning hour of my shift when I am there with coworkers so I stay late after while Im clocked out.

Does anyone else experience this or something similar or know anything about what is going on?

Nobody thinks or learns well under stress. Your stress threshold seems to be pretty low. Mine is set a bit higher, but I can't read & comprehend non-fiction in noisy crowded places like airports.

I know sometimes when people are talking to me, even if I am concentrating on what they are saying, all I hear is sounds, even though I should understand what is being said and my hearing is just fine. I don't know if this is the same thing or not, I don't think it is because what I experience isn't always in stressful situations and it doesn't seem to happen very often either. All I know is I get confused when this happens and then I become embarrassed because I know I should have been able to understand but couldn't, but was unable to explain what happened.

I get the same as both nerdymama and alfonso, however for me what seems to cause it is either mental tiredness, being overwhelmed or too many distractors causing different sources of information to merge into one. I also have other variants of this, for example it can be difficult for me to use words myself - like attatch words to my thoughts.
Not much you can do, for me I have improved this by trying to prevent myself from getting to tired/overwhelmed (e.g. spending more time in quiet places), and meditiation activities as well as other tricks to filter information sources better and ignore distractors.
Now you know what causes the problem perhaps try to find ways to compensate or reduce the problem. For the first hour could you work in a different room or put up a partition around where you work, could you change your work hours to start one hour later and finish one hour later.

I experience something like that. It just takes me longer to make sense out of what someone is saying, so I prefer having instructions written down, then I can read it over until everything clicks.

I have not experienced the problem with not understanding what is being said. I have experienced something else, that might be related?

I don´t know if it is a perfectly normal experience - but sometimes I seem to lapse back to something I did earlier that day. I think the best way to describe it is with an example (I am still trying to figure this out myself). At the moment I can only remember an silly example from yesterday. I am driving along the road looking at the poppies in the cornfield. I think they look very dark and I am about to remove my sunglasses when I realise that I only wore my sunglasses earlier that day. It is as if I forget that I am no longer wearing sunglasses and it takes time for my brain to realise that. It usually takes a long time for the brain to catch up (seconds).

It happens sometimes with physical things (like I think that I am still wearing sunglasses) but also with directions (think that I am at some place that I was at earlier in the day).

I find this a bit difficult to explain - I have never tried to explain it before and the feeling is not longlasting.

Helle

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphasia

in·ef·fa·ble ( n- f -b l). adj. 1. Incapable of being expressed; indescribable or unutterable.

I used to have this problem all the time. It's stress, like the above person said.

Interestingly enough, the study of language theory holds that words and meanings are tied together but do not ever directly meet. Degrees of stress cause them to come apart more often, I guess.