Don’t fret, neurotics – there are advantages to worrying
Icannot remember a time when some large worry has not cast a shadow over my day. As a young child, I would lie awake fearing everything from the impending embarrassment of gym class, to the death of my parents, to the prospect of a nuclear holocaust. The form of my fears may have changed as I age, but the tendency to see disaster on the horizon has remained.
I am far from alone in this: negative mental chatter and doom-laden fantasies are common characteristics of the personality trait “neuroticism”. Like other personality traits, this can measured using simple questions such as: Do you suffer from “nerves”?
Do you worry too long after an embarrassing experience?
Are your feelings easily hurt?
Are you often troubled by feelings of guilt?
Are you an irritable person?
If you answer yes to all these questions, you too may be highly neurotic, along with 30% of the population.
For a long time, high neuroticism was thought to be a very real cause for concern; it was associated with poor mental and physical health, and reduced longevity. But recent research suggests that we might take a more balanced view of the trait. Some neurotic people use their worries to fuel creativity, and in some circumstances, they might even be at a lower risk of serious illnesses such as heart disease and cancer.
The influence of our neuroticism all depends on the ways we choose to process the feelings that it produces – and when we are armed with this knowledge, we can all learn to manage our negative conversations with ourselves more effectively.
Black and white thinking
The dismal opinion of neuroticism can be traced to Freudian and Jungian psychoanalysis in the early 20th century. “They had the view that anxiety is something to be cured,” says Dr Adam Perkins at King’s College London.
This view remained when scientists started to investigate the big five personality traits – openness to experience, agreeableness, conscientiousness, extroversion and neuroticism – each of which could be measured on a spectrum. This allowed researchers to identify the outcomes of each trait. Unfortunately, the pictures that emerged often lacked nuance. “Personality researchers often saw things in black and white,” says Perkins; higher-than-average levels of extroversion were thought to be “wholly good” he says, while higher-than-average levels of neuroticism were considered “wholly bad”.
Fans of the author Susan Cain will already recognise the folly of this approach. In her book Quiet, she deconstructed the claim that high levels of extroversion are always desirable, and showed how introversion – its polar opposite – could be a virtue. Introverts often make better decisions as leaders, for example, and when they are given the solitude they crave, demonstrate greater creativity.
Neuroticism may be due a similar image change. Take the claim that high neuroticism contributes to worse physical health, through a heightened stress response. The idea makes theoretical sense, yet the evidence is conflicting. While some studies do suggest that neuroticism leads to illness and a shorter lifespan, others have failed to find a link. A handful of papers have even shown that neurotic people have betterhealth andgreaterlongevity than do those with sunnier dispositions. These studies were well conducted with relatively large sample sizes: they can’t be easily dismissed.
Rather than looking at neuroticism as a monolith, it seems that we need to focus on how the trait is expressed in different people. Recent studies by Dr Alexander Weiss and colleagues at the University of Edinburgh, for instance, suggest that there may be different subtypes of the trait. For some people, neuroticism may be characterised by general anxiety and feelings of tension; these people are more likely to report feeling “nervous” and “highly strung”. For others, their neuroticism may be characterised by more concrete worries. They are more likely to report letting their thoughts linger over past embarrassments, for instance, and being troubled by a sense of guilt for their mistakes.
To find out if these differences could influence health outcomes such as death from cancer or cardiovascular disease, Weiss’s team conducted a series of studies examining the health records of hundreds of thousands of people. Their analyses confirmed that people who scored extremely high on all the different factors did indeed have a slightly higher risk of mortality. Those who showed just one facet, however, tended to fair much better.
The “anxious-tense” group were in no more danger than the average population. “This factor didn’t seem to have a really strong association in one way or another,” says Weiss. Those who were characterised by excess worries, meanwhile, had a lower risk of illness than the general population. “They were less likely to die from all causes.”
Exactly why this should be the case is still unclear, but it’s possible that, thanks to their hypervigilance, the worriers were more likely to spot potential health problems before they became a danger.
Whether or not those worries translate into better health could also depend on the presence of other personality traits. People who combine their neuroticism with higher levels of conscientiousness would be more likely to make a plan to improve their health, for instance. Recent studies have shown that conscientious neurotics are less likely to smoke, and are more likely to follow exercise guidelines than is the average person.
Advantages of worrying
In the right circumstances, higher neuroticism might also encourage greater creativity. The neurotic’s worries, after all, seem to come from an overactive imagination. “You’ve got a sort of cinema screen inside your head, where you are playing different possibilities, which allows you to turn things over in your mind,” says Perkins. At its worst, this tendency could contribute to unhappy rumination, but it may also allow deeper thinking and more original ideas. “You probably have some kind of advantage compared with someone who never thinks about problems.”
Perkins points to the example of Isaac Newton, who was known to have a melancholic and ruminative temperament that is common to people with higher-than-average neuroticism. His writing suggests that he spent a long time churning over the scientific questions that were troubling him. “He would repeatedly brood over these problems, and eventually, after maybe months or years, he could crack it.”
Perkins’s hypothesis is admittedly speculative, but a few surveys have