Do You Get Anxiety? Here's Why It Might Mean You're A Genius

In the world we live in today, we have a lot on our plates. With the economy crashing worldwide, people struggling just to survive and pay bills, violence and riots increasing everywhere, and everyone wondering how we will survive all of this, of course this will produce fear and worry among us all.

Of course, some of us worry more than others, and we can’t really help it. We have worry etched into our DNA, and contemplate every decision and outcome thoroughly. If this sounds like you, then don’t worry; it might just mean you’re a genius, and here’s why.

If You Worry or Have Anxiety, Here’s Why It Might Mean You’re A Genius

Many of us worry in general about how we will take care of ourselves, pay bills, and all of those lovely adult responsibilities. However, worrying about a specific problem and thinking about the impact of our decisions might mean that we have a high level of creative intelligence.

This indicates great problem solving skills, higher thinking, and empathy.

A recent study discovered a strong correlation between excess worry and anxiety, and high intelligence. Personality Neurobiology expert Dr. Adam Perkins, says this about our thoughts and how it relates to intelligence:

“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.”

To put it simply, Perkins means that if we think more negatively the majority of the time, this doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing. Rather, people who worry and have anxiety might just have higher intelligence and creativity because they can spot problems before others do, and work on solving them.

This makes sense when you look at the world at large. Although it might seem very backwards on the surface, think about how many products out there strive to make our lives better. With smartphones, innovators saw that society had a need that they didn’t even know about. They wanted to have the ability to take pictures with the click of a button, connect with their friends on the go with social media, and have access to the Internet wherever they went.

Self-help novelists and speakers see that people have a need to develop themselves and become better in every aspect of life. They saw a problem, and created techniques to solve it.

Worry and anxiety help to transform society and make it better. Without worry, we would have nothing to solve, and would remain stagnant and complacent.

Dr. Perkins also had this to say:

“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.’”

Even though positive thinking can help people to revolutionize their life, negative thinking also serves its purpose. It helps us to ponder new opportunities and ideas, and decide how we will approach a problem.

Don’t think of a negative thought as inherently bad – think of it as a tool to help you build a new possibility. The worry can help us to identify a problem and come up with a better way of approaching it than we did before.

The only reason you should worry about worrying too much is when it affects your life in such a way that you can’t focus on your work or the people you love the most. When worry and anxiety consume you, then they become a problem. However, when you use these tools in order to create, learn, and analyze a situation or problem, and use them sparingly, then feel free to worry away!

Worry can either act as fuel to the fire, or a barrier keeping us from our best selves. You get to choose how best to utilize this emotion, and hopefully, you will use it to improve yourself and the world around you. Worry can definitely paralyze you, but it doesn’t have to. You can transcend the fear and use it to take you to the next step in life.

Creative geniuses help us to advance in society. Without them, we might still live without modern irrigation, television, cars or phones. A creative person looks at the details of the world, and ponders how everything might work together as a whole in order to have a better functioning society. They might live in their heads a lot, but they sure do creative beautiful things out of their imagination, and we should thank them for it.