‘My mind is always at the highest DEF-CON level possible, but the truth is that I can’t control everything. I wish I could. Instead, I meticulously plan and worry, and imagine the worst case scenarios for everything …’
The comedian, Susan Calman in her autobiography, Cheer Up, Love: Adventures in Depression with the Crab of Hate
My client Louise, an MD, slept badly. She said that she frequently woke in the middle of the night with her heart pounding because she was convinced she’d made a potentially catastrophic mistake in the work she’d done that day. She would get up and go to her laptop, and spend the small hours sitting in her pyjamas retracing her steps and checking her calculations and emails. Once, in a complete panic, she couldn’t find a document she needed and went into the office, banging on the door demanding that the security guard let her in at 5 am.
She said that these abrupt awakenings had happened four times in the last year. But they had all been false alarms. On three occasions there was no mistake. On the fourth she found a trivial and easily-rectifiable error which could easily have been put right during the normal working day.
I said I was very concerned about her high levels of anxiety and we should try to address them. She thought about it for a bit and then said, “the thing is, it’s part of why I get so much done. I don’t want to lose my edge.”
I came to this topic via my consideration of creativity and the creative personality (Articles 6,7 and 8) and I’ll return to these subjects in due course. But in the next couple of articles I want to look in more depth at why some of us, not only the highly creative among us, worry more and find work more stressful than our more robust colleagues.
The elephant in the office
Susan Calman says that, as a depressed teenager, she found it impossible to talk to anybody about how awful she felt. It just wasn’t the sort of thing she could broach in her family. As a society we have a tendency (though it seems to be reducing as time passes, I’m glad to say) to recoil from strong negative emotions and a preference for ignoring them if at all possible. They frighten and baffle us, particularly in the work context, where we like to pretend perfect rationality rules.
But we don’t leave our emotional selves at home when we go to work. We know that we and our colleagues sometimes overreact to the normal setbacks of working life and become disproportionately angry or upset by what is really a relatively minor issue. The problem, when this happens, is that we don’t understand what’s going on. We don’t feel qualified, and it seems intrusive, to try to psychoanalyse our colleagues.
Yet, strong negative emotions are powerful and destructive forces, and the source of much friction and unhappiness at work just as they are at home. They’re also the cause of organisational underperformance and dysfunction. As a coach, I probably spent more time talking to my clients about these rampaging elephants in the office than any other topic. And, once again, a little psychological insight can be invaluable in dealing with these difficult issues
The wolf in the bushes
In our ancient ancestors, negative emotions - fear, anxiety, disgust, guilt, shame - evolved to protect us from harms – attack by predators, aggression from other groups, eating something toxic, offending the group and losing its protection. They trigger avoidance behaviours: fight, flight, freeze or, in the worst case, depression, the extreme version of freeze – disengaging with life and going to the back of the cave.
We tend to refer to ‘emotions’ and ‘feelings’ interchangeably in normal conversations. The neuroscientist, Professor Antonio Damasio, distinguishes them: an emotion is a physical process, a cascade of physiological changes triggered by our brains in response to a stimulus, whereas a feeling is our conscious awareness of the stimulus and those changes. The emotion - the physiological effect - happens first. The feeling – the fear or anger or joy we consciously experience - happens half a second later. Your emotions tell you – ‘look, pay attention. This is important: it’s good/bad for you’. If you see a bus bearing down on you as you’re crossing the road, your unconscious mind recognises danger and triggers a shot of adrenaline. Your heart rate increases, your blood vessels dilate to bring blood to your muscles, your mental focus narrows to assess the speed and trajectory of the bus, and you start to run a split second before you consciously register the bus or feel fear. Meanwhile your rational mind has gone offline.
Our negative emotion systems operate on a ‘fail safe’ principle; that is, they produce a lot of ‘false positive’ warnings, but few ‘false negatives’. The evolutionary reasons for this are obvious: the complacent ancestor who saw a shadow in the bushes but decided to ignore the possibility that it was a wolf, was much less likely to survive to reproduce than the one who erred on the side of caution. As the personality psychologist Daniel Nettle says, the uncomfortable consequence for us now, when the constant danger of being eaten on any given day has fortunately receded, is that most of us worry groundlessly much of the time.
Why some of us worry more than others
The Big 5 psychometric measures individual differences in our propensity to worry, feel fear and anxiety and adopt defensive behaviours. In effect it’s measuring the sensitivity of our negative emotion systems, the degree of emotional upset we experience per unit of stress. The Big 5 calls this trait, ‘Neuroticism/Emotional Instability’, and it is normally distributed in the population, ie most of us are somewhere in the middle of the bell curve. Low Neuroticism scorers are calm, stable and secure and take setbacks in their stride. But high Neuroticism scorers find both the big challenges and the small hassles of life very upsetting. The personality psychologist, Daniel Nettle, suggests that if the person at the centre of the normal distribution 'is worrying groundlessly 80% of the time that they worry, then the poor old high Neuroticism scorer is probably worrying needlessly 99% of the time that they worry’.
Our personalities are the product of the interaction between the physiology of our brains, which we’re born with, and our early experience. Studies of twins suggest the contribution of nature and nurture to an individual’s Neuroticism score is around 50:50.
There is an organ in the brain called the amygdala, which is thought to be crucial in emotional memory and in triggering our fight/flight reaction, and this is more active in high Neuroticism scorers; indeed, it may even be physically bigger and denser in such people. Nettle suggests that the neurotransmitter serotonin may be important to the functioning of the amygdala and the regulation of negative emotions. Modern antidepressants, such as Prozac, (Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs)) work by regulating levels of serotonin in the brain. Studies have shown that people with a particular form of the serotonin transporter gene are more susceptible to depression than others after experiencing stress.
The time when you are most vulnerable to such stresses is early childhood. That is when your emotional brain is growing much faster than your cognitive brain, and your amygdala is storing the emotional models which will determine how you relate to other people and how you see and feel about yourself in later life.
How you develop your sense of self
‘If I was to ask myself the standard happiness question – ‘is this glass half full or half empty?’ I’d say ‘there is no glass, I don’t deserve a glass…’
Susan Calman, ‘Cheer Up, Love: Adventures in Depression with the Crab of Hate’
The therapist and neuroscientist, Louis Cozolino, describes the effect of childhood experiences on our personalities in a particularly arresting way. He uses the term, ‘core shame’.
When we are young children the adults caring for us are the dominant influence on us. We need the person caring for us to provide unconditional love, to respect us as a separate person with our own emotional life, be attuned to our needs, and to soothe us when we are upset. In many cases this works well: the parenting is ‘good enough’ for the child to be confident that it will be looked after, to grow up calm and secure. But it can go wrong. If the child doesn’t get what it needs from its caregivers, it internalises distorted emotional models of itself and its relationships with others.
A baby is the centre of its own universe, and is very sensitive to the thoughts and emotions of its carer. If its parent is absent, ill, depressed (maybe she has, and has passed on, that gene), absorbed in their own problems, or simply not psychologically attuned to it, the baby may assume at a deep emotional level that this is its own fault. It imagines what its mother is thinking and feeling about it, and concludes (though of course not in words, as it has none) ‘If I were loveable, my parent would love me/ would not have gone away/ would not ignore me/ would not criticise me/would understand my needs. I am therefore not loveable.’ The child who does not get the love and attention it needs develops a deep conviction that there is something wrong with it. This is what Cozolino means by ‘core shame’; others call it a conviction that one is ‘unworthy’, insecurity, or lack of self-esteem.
In extreme cases, this sort of deprivation in childhood can lead to serious lifelong psychological problems that prevent the individual from functioning, such as clinical depression, or a personality disorder such as psychopathy. More often a parent’s love for a child may be sufficient to avoid these crippling levels of core shame, but nevertheless be conditional. They may be loving if the child is quiet and obedient but angry if it cries, or proud of a child if it does well at school, but critical if its performance is mediocre; or if the parent has unmet emotional needs themselves, because of their own background, they may expect the child to soothe and care for them. These flawed ways of parenting are frequently passed down the generations, each generation internalising them as the only/normal way to be.
In these cases, the child will adopt the model that gets them the approval they need: they will become compliant, or work very hard at school, or assume it is up to them to care for everyone, or sort out family problems. And it is these models which many anxious people carry into their working lives. The desire to ‘atone’ for their deficiencies makes them strive to do things perfectly, to believe that they must work as hard as is humanly possible, to be hypervigilant about risks and mistakes (because it’s their responsibility to make sure nothing goes wrong), because at a very deep, emotional level, hidden from them and those round them, they believe they will only be ‘worthy’ people if they do all these things.
The downside can have an upside
‘Just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you.’
Variously attributed
Having this sort of emotional makeup – a sense of unworthiness driven by anxiety - is extremely uncomfortable for the person involved. They worry, mostly unnecessarily, all the time, and catastrophise – assume the worst possible outcome in any scenario- which is psychologically and physically very draining. They are susceptible to low mood, anxiety disorders, panic attacks, clinical depression, and even suicide. They suffer from insomnia, digestive problems and low immune response because of the suppressant effect of the stress hormone, cortisol on the immune system. They may even be more at risk of serious illness. It makes you wonder why evolution should have selected for this characteristic.
The answer is, of course, that just as it was of benefit to our early ancestors to have some conscientious, hardworking people around who were vigilant and responsible, and they were highly values, and so it has continued to the present day. Provided they are able to function, and haven’t sunk into chaos or depression, Neurotic people have a more realistic view of the world than their more cheerful counterparts who are captured by the optimism bias. They are good at identifying risks and obstacles. Because they have a tendency to catastrophise, they take great care to plan to avoid problems. They try desperately to control the level of risk. Susan Calman has described how if she has to go to a meeting which involves an unfamiliar journey, she does a dry run the day before to make sure she can avoid possible transport pitfalls.
Many high functioning Neurotics have absorbed the message that they will only be worthy people if they work as hard as is humanly possible. They also find work soothing; they can lose themselves in it; it stills the rumination about their deficiencies; it gives them a sense of achievement and self-worth. So, they’re driven to succeed and are often workaholics and perfectionists; they get a lot done. Indeed, there is a weak positive correlation between Neuroticism and success in professional occupations, where these traits have clear benefits. They are discontented with themselves and world as it is, and feel a responsibility, a compulsion, to make both better – the root of creativity. And as we’ve seen, if they are artistically creative, their emotional depth, the fact that they have survived mental suffering, enables them to communicate meaning and enlightenment to the rest of us.
So, if you are one of us (yes, reader, I’m definitely on the right of the bell curve) try to take a bit of comfort in the upside of your (challenging) personality trait.
In my next articles I will look at some of the less benign effects of Neuroticism on its more extreme sufferers and in the workplace, and consider ways in which we can mitigate its effects in ourselves and other people.
Sources
Albrecht Durer Melencholia 1514
Daniel Nettle: Personality – What makes you the way you are, OUP, 2007
Louis Cozolino: Why Therapy Works – Using our minds to change our brains, WW Norton & Company, 2016