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I have a theory about high IQ and anxiety: The more intelligent and creative a person, the more sensitive to negative emotion they're going to be, simply becau

I have a theory about high IQ and anxiety: The more intelligent and creative a person, the more sensitive to negative emotion they're going to be, simply because their subconscious mind will see more connections between their negative emotions and the things, people and places the person has, sees or frequents. In other words, they'll naturally realize the world is more inhospitable than the average intellect, so their subconscious will have more negative data points to track. When something bad happens, they'll need to work harder to convince their subconscious that it won't happen again. Anxiety itself is therefore because the subconscious currently sees familiar patterns it saw before, during painful experiences, and it throws out feelings of anxiety to slow down the conscious mind to force caution, as if the person is looking at a minefield and may not know it. Edit: And the key to living anxiety-free, at least for my own personal experience, is understanding every negative emotion in my past, why it happened (whether my fault or not), how I reacted, and how I would react today In a way that would avoid the same terrible outcome. Usually it requires forgiveness, either for something someone did to me or to forgive myself because I was ignorant but no longer am and most importantly I/my subconscious knows if my forgiveness is genuine, namely when I'm ready to sympathize with someone else in the same situation. It's incredibly liberating.

colechristensen 7y ago
I would guess it has something to do with not experiencing certain kinds of difficulty and the reactions that come with it until a development window has passed. Everyone expects good things from you and congratulates you for achieving them without any effort during the years you are supposed to be learning about things like difficulty and success and failure and life doesn't ramp up in difficulty until well after some things are fairly set. Afterwords when things go beyond "effortless" difficulty you start to get negative feedback from people around you and yourself and this is a novel experience outside of the period where negative novel experiences are internalized as normal. (Related: fairy tales and scary stories told to young children help them cope with a dangerous and difficult world, "too scary for kids" attitudes build adults who have trouble with the real world.)
sytelus 7y ago
I've been around too many high IQ/high anxiety folks. My read is that many of these people constantly obsess over everything that can possibly go wrong and try to think about work arounds, literally ALL their waking hours. They are master at finding things to worry about far in future whether its job, work, house, relationship, friends, family. It's like you are playing a big game of chess but you compulsively think about 8 moves deep instead of just 3 or 4. As you will totally overload yourself and always keep encountering pretty bad scenarios, it keeps you tremendously stressed all the time. Like your overclocked laptop is running very hot and built-in fans aren't able to keep up. The people who I thought had normal or even slightly below normal IQs live rather chill lifestyle and assume things will just take care of itself. I think the amount of average stress you experience after adjusting to direct causes is a pretty good signal of IQ you have.

colechristensen 7y ago

I would guess it has something to do with not experiencing certain kinds of difficulty and the reactions that come with it until a development window has passed. Everyone expects good things from you and congratulates you for achieving them without any effort during the years you are supposed to be learning about things like difficulty and success and failure and life doesn't ramp up in difficulty until well after some things are fairly set. Afterwords when things go beyond "effortless" difficulty you start to get negative feedback from people around you and yourself and this is a novel experience outside of the period where negative novel experiences are internalized as normal. (Related: fairy tales and scary stories told to young children help them cope with a dangerous and difficult world, "too scary for kids" attitudes build adults who have trouble with the real world.)

sytelus 7y ago

I've been around too many high IQ/high anxiety folks. My read is that many of these people constantly obsess over everything that can possibly go wrong and try to think about work arounds, literally ALL their waking hours. They are master at finding things to worry about far in future whether its job, work, house, relationship, friends, family. It's like you are playing a big game of chess but you compulsively think about 8 moves deep instead of just 3 or 4. As you will totally overload yourself and always keep encountering pretty bad scenarios, it keeps you tremendously stressed all the time. Like your overclocked laptop is running very hot and built-in fans aren't able to keep up. The people who I thought had normal or even slightly below normal IQs live rather chill lifestyle and assume things will just take care of itself. I think the amount of average stress you experience after adjusting to direct causes is a pretty good signal of IQ you have.