One of my kids suffers from anxiety, and one of the things I’ve learned through a combination of his experiences and conversations with the fantastic healthcare professionals that have helped him is that there isn’t a single type of anxiety. Pretty much everyone labelled with anxiety has different experiences.
The way my son tries to manage his anxiety is by trying to minimise the number of occasions where something unexpected happens, particularly when he’s out of the house. He isn’t anxious all the time. On the rare occasions he travels alone, it’s only after meticulous preparation - where he’s going, where’s his ticket, what will he see along the way etc etc.
What the triggers an anxiety episode is if something unexpected happens. Generally that’s a delay, a platform change, that sort of stuff. But were he to lose his ticket or phone, be challenged as to the validity of his ticket (rightly or wrongly) it would most likely get messy very quickly. He’s had one very difficult experience where he missed a connection because of a delay, but got the next train to his destination because that’s what his preparation told him to do, unfortunately it was a different TOC and his ticket wasn’t valid. When the conductor told him his ticket wasn’t valid he had an anxiety attack but thankfully rang me, and I was able to speak to the conductor who allowed him to complete his journey.
Do other people use anxiety as a convenient excuse to try and explain poor decision making or mitigate the impact? Maybe. People tell lies all the time. But to say people with anxiety are less likely to have ticketing issues is, in my experience, nonsense.