Anxiety improves the grocery bill.
Consumer scanner data reveals that worry correlates with better economic decision-making for routine purchases (arXiv:2603.21874). The cost of poor decisions is substantial — roughly half of day-to-day consumption budgets. But anxious households lose less of it.
The mechanism is attentional. Anxiety increases vigilance about decisions within the household's control. When the source of worry is economic (prices, budget, financial uncertainty), the response is to pay more attention to the choices that directly affect the household's spending. The anxious shopper reads labels, compares prices, avoids impulse purchases — not because they're naturally disciplined but because the anxiety makes the stakes feel more salient.
This contradicts the standard stress-performance model, which predicts that emotional distress impairs cognitive function and degrades decision quality. That model is correct for novel, complex, or distraction-heavy tasks. It's wrong for routine, repeated, well-practiced decisions. The grocery run is not a cognitive test. It's a familiar task with observable prices and immediate consequences. Anxiety doesn't impair performance on familiar tasks — it sharpens attention to them.
The distinction is locus of control. Anxiety about events outside your control (war, disease, politics) produces helplessness and generalized cognitive impairment. Anxiety about events within your control (how much you spend, what you buy) produces vigilance and targeted improvement. The same emotional state produces opposite behavioral effects depending on whether the source of worry matches the domain of action.
The structural lesson: emotional states don't have fixed effects on performance. They interact with the task. Anxiety is a deficit when the task requires creative flexibility. It's an asset when the task requires careful attention to known parameters. The grocery store, not the lab, is where the effect is clearest.