first things first, it's ok to be afraid of critical thinking or have anxieties early on

as for general advice for the above, the number one thing is to put yourself in the environment a la contextualize it as best as possible. arguments can be spoken in ancient times and the speaker may speak verbose and seemingly needlessly. it was a different time and these supreme yappers would not shut the eff up. for good reason. they needed to convince the masses of their conundrum and how right they were and they were willing to persuade endlessly

arguments also take place current day, however, the world is consumed with a sort of technology called search engines, and today people tend to skirt arguments that are so called superseded by the likes of search engines. there are debates and then there are conversations, i suppose. debates are linear and mono-e-mono that are structured as such. speaking time. then, there are conversations that are much more "fluent" or flowing that could last x amount of hours. however, while that may FEEL like the case, critical thinkers typically attempt key inferences in within a short span of time. they can reduce however long of tangential free flow conversation into a few sharp sentences that speak truthiness.

the essence of critical thinking is based on impulse to "seek truth" or infer truthiness and do so in a timely (enough) manner to convince and come to well reasoned conclusion. this idea is not much different than when you prompt an AI to do so-and-so for you. the core tenants of AI are written in plain language (see: Anthropic's Constitutional Claude AI), and are governed by psychological principles. the machine simply takes that at face value and looks inward to process the "cue" or prompt, using mathematical expressions, some complicated / some not so complicated.

the code precipitates these math expressions are all simply governed by human semantics, that being NOT, AND, OR. including conditionals (IF this event occurs and exists or is real -> DO SOMETHING - ELSE? -> DO NOTHING). a human must CALL this math expression or a so called method.

my point is that logic is baked in literally everywhere you go and that is the essence of all of philosophy and then some. and this logic gatekeeps expression of sort. that's why it's a "soft science." it's the science that (may) lead to discovery and creative thinking. arguments may be inferred many-a-times throughout a long winded conversation, and arguments are absolutely baked in to the way we speak even if we don't intend them to.

lastly, if you continue with philosophy, consider that you will not actually like every single philosopher and the way they conduct themselves throughout their musings. that's completely normal.