I cannot 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 better health and greater longevity 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 found that successful artists tend to show greater neuroticism than the average population, and certain laboratory experiments suggest that greater neuroticism results in more insightful problem-solving. Perkins also cites a study by Dr Paul Irwing at the University of Manchester, who recently examined the personalities of amateur and professional comedians. While the average personality traits were similar for both groups, Irwing found that the professional comedians had considerably higher levels of neuroticism than the amateurs and the average population.
One explanation could be that the life of professional comedians leads them to become more neurotic over time. It cannot be easy, after all, to rely on people’s laughter for your living, and be faced with the constant scrutiny of critics. Irwing, however, finds this unlikely; there’s little evidence that environmental factors, such as someone’s profession, change personality. He suggests that the arrow of causation runs in the opposite direction: neuroticism may make people funnier.
A greater sensitivity to social slights or embarrassments could contribute to l’esprit de l’escalier, for instance – that experience of finding the perfect witticism only after you have left a conversation. Those thoughts could then inspire new comedic material that may not occur to someone who is less inclined to mull over awkward situations. The comedian may even amplify some of the neurotic musings for comic effect. From Joan Rivers to Simon Amstell, plenty of comedians have mined their anxieties for their acts, after all.
Given that laughter reduces stress, humour could also be a useful strategy for comics to cope more constructively with the worries that plague their minds, suggests Irwing. “Comedians turn something negative into something positive.”
Given the unhappiness it brings, neuroticism may still not be the most desirable trait, but acknowledging its strengths as well as its weaknesses could be heartening for anyone who feels that they are defined by their anxieties and worries. “It’s important for the public to have a nuanced picture,” Perkins says. He even claims that, for some people, “neuroticism may be a form of superpower”.
Strategies for calm
If you find that your anxiety and worries are overwhelming, psychological research can offer some techniques to calm your feelings and quieten the negative chatter in your head.
One of my favourite strategies is self-distancing, which involves looking at your problem from an outside perspective. You might imagine that you are advising a friend who is facing the same issue. You could even talk to yourself in the third person – “David thinks…” – while thinking your way through the topic that is bothering you.
The technique may sound a little strange, but a considerable body of scientific research shows that this prevents brooding and encourages a more reflective and philosophical stance towards the situation at hand, so that you are better able to find a constructive path forwards. And this may have long-term benefits for mental health. A recent study by Ariana Orvell, an assistant professor at Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania, for instance, found that a short online course on the best ways to practise self-distancing reduced participants’ risks of developing depression over the following six months. This was especially true for those scoring high in neuroticism, who may have been most vulnerable to depression.
If self-distancing isn’t your thing, another useful practice can be acceptance and reappraisal, in which you attempt to look at your worries and anxieties more dispassionately. Without denying your feelings, you might question whether there is a good factual basis for the thoughts that are occupying your mind, whether they convey useful information on which you can act, and whether there might also be a more positive interpretation of the event. This kind of exercise may take a little time to master, but cognitive behavioural therapists find that it helps clients to curb their “catastrophising” thought-spirals.
This new understanding of neuroticism has certainly shifted my own perspective on my worrying habit. The tendency to overthink life’s challenges may be a part of who I am, but I can now choose how deeply I engage with the fears and apprehensions. I still feel that a storm is approaching, but experience tells me that the clouds will often pass without my ship capsizing.
The Expectation Effect: How Your Mindset Can Transform Your Life by David Robson is published by Canongate (£10.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
