If you’re like me, you think a little too much. Your
thoughts and ideas swirl around so much in your mind that it can be hard to get
much done, and it results in anxiety. Relax. According to a new study,
excessive worry isn’t exactly a bad thing. In some cases, it could mean you
have a high IQ. Not that that’s something I can brag about for myself, but
perhaps for you.
"It occurred to me that if you happen to have a
preponderance of negatively hued self-generated thoughts, due to high levels of
spontaneous activity in the parts of the medial prefrontal cortex that govern
conscious perception of threat and you also have a tendency to switch to panic
sooner than average people, due to possessing especially high reactivity in the
basolateral nuclei of the amygdala, then that means you can experience intense
negative emotions even when there's no threat present. This could mean that for
specific neural reasons, high scorers on neuroticism have a highly active
imagination, which acts as a built-in threat generator," said Dr. Adam
Perkins, an expert in neurobiology of personality at King's College in London..
"Cheerful, happy-go-lucky people by definition do not
brood about problems and so must be at a disadvantage when problem-solving
compared to a more neurotic person," he continued. "We have a useful
sanity check for our theory because it is easy to observe that many geniuses
seem to have a brooding, unhappy tendency that hints they are fairly high on
the neuroticism spectrum. For example, think of the life stories of Isaac
Newton, Charles Darwin, Vincent Van Gogh, Kurt Cobain, etc. Perhaps the link
between creativity and neuroticism was summed up most succinctly of all by John
Lennon when he said: 'Genius is pain.'"
Dr. Jeremy Coplan, a researcher and professor of psychiatry
at State University of New York Downstate Medical Center, weighs in as well.
"Although we tend to view anxiety as not being good for
us, it is linked with intelligence — a highly adaptive trait," says Dr.
Coplan. "High levels of anxiety can be disabling, and patients' worries
are often irrational,' But that "every so often there's a wild-card
danger. Then, that excessive worry becomes highly adaptive,"Coplan notes
that, "People who act on the signals of that wild-card danger are likely
to preserve their lives and the lives of their offspring."
So there you go. Your feelings of
anxiety may actually be the key to the survival of humanity. Not to, you know,
stress you out or anything.
Source : higherperspectives