This will be necessarily incomplete for the time being and sound like a bunch of vague woo BS since it's a topic I don't think I fully understand yet.
I find that emotions, and specifically anxiety, can play a big role in my ability to solve problems or understand things. There are cases where this is obvious: in an interview or exam setting you might get stressed and lose the ability to think clearly. But I find that there are other more subtle cases.
I find that if I'm not in the right frame of my mind it's difficult for me to be creative or to learn new ideas. Something about generalized anxiety translates into a fear of exploration or a fear of being open to new things. It makes it difficult to solve non-standard or open-ended problems. And conversely, there have been moments in my life where I've felt the opposite: calm, open -- and it has the expected effect where it's easier to come up with good new ideas or to understand things.
A calm state of mind also makes it easier to feel things intuitively. For example, for most of my life I had never felt like I "got" why the gambler's fallacy was false. Like I knew it to be a fallacy, but I never really felt it deep in my core. But recently I was in a more relaxed state of mind and I was playing around with a random number generator, and I had a sudden feeling of internalizing memorylessness. Usually there's some sort of stress or fear feeling that makes me emotionally need, say, for there to be a tails after a long streak of heads. But in that moment there was a calm open confident feeling in my head where I understood.
Anxiety can make me prone to skipping over difficult-to-understand portions of a derivation, or steps in a problem that require a lot of attention to detail. There's a feeling of needing to go fast, that again seems analogous to fear. Being confronted with something that I don't understand immediately, or a problem that is open-ended, feels scary on a deep level, like there is actually some real danger there.
I've found that antidotes to this are basically to do easy problems that require some amount of working out the details/brute force/guess and check (easier high school math competition problems are good for this). Problems that feel like they have no holds to grab onto at first glance but quickly fall once you work out a few cases. Reading somewhat dense prose helps, because if you skip too much you lose track so you're forced to slow down and read thoroughly. The biggest cause is mindlessly scrolling when I'm not already "in the right mindset". I don't really engage with what's in front of me, and feel this sort of anxious push to keep scrolling, which exacerbates the issues.
I can also, sometimes, power through somewhat with sheer force. If I sit up straight and open, and try to conjure up the feeling of attacking the problem, then I can lessen the instinctual cowering response (and yes, the physical posture does actually make a big difference).