Worry and anxiety linked to high IQ?

Are you an over thinker? Do thoughts endlessly go around and around in your head as you make up various scenarios and compare them with a multitude of possible outcomes? Do you often end up anxious and stressed out?

Don’t fret, I mean really, don’t fret, stop it right now! Because a new study has shown that excessive worry might not be such a bad thing after all — and that such anxiety may have evolved in people along with intelligence.

According to Dr. Adam Perkins, an expert in Neurobiology of Personality at King’s College in London:

“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.”

He goes on to say that: “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. 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.’

It’s official the people who worry in this world are the creators. They are the ones who see the problems that need to be fixed before the happy go lucky people do.

So in addition to those who worry a lot, those with anxiety disorder tended to have higher IQ scores than healthy people, as well as higher levels of activity in regions of the brain that aid in communication between parts of the brain. These regions are thought to have contributed to the evolutionary success of humans.

Although we tend to view anxiety as not being good for us, it is linked with intelligence — a highly adaptive trait,’ says Dr. Jeremy Coplan, study researcher and professor of psychiatry at State University of New York Downstate Medical Center. He goes on to explain from his findings that:

‘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 clarifies 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 really don’t fret about your fretting any more, its you and many others that may be the key to the survival of the human race.

Source: I Heart Intelligence

Related:

• Your country's average IQ (and more rankings you didn't know)
• Social Anxiety May Be Associated with High IQ and Empathetic Ability
• From Darwin To Einstein: How Did Brilliant Minds Spend Their Everyday Lives?
• Socrates Was One Of The Smartest People Ever Lived. Here Are 24 Out Of His Most Important Quotes That Everyone Needs To Read
• Are You Emotionally Intelligent? Find Out Your EQ
• The 9 Types of Multiple Intelligences - Which "Smart" Are You?
• Do You Have The Intelligence Of A Scientist Or An Artist?
• What's Your Dominant Intelligence?
• Is Your Brain Logical Or Creative?
• How Much Common Sense Do You Have?
• Only 2 % Are Able To Solve This Einstein's Riddle! Are YOU Able?