Anxiety is Linked to Higher IQ

Anxiety isn't really appealing as it would sometimes cause an individual to breakdown and worry for no specific reason. As per recent studies however, worrying too much and anxiety is linked to acquiring higher IQ. Live Science stated that a small study suggested that "anxiety may have evolved in people along with intelligence."

As per the studies, individuals diagnosed with general anxiety disorder have higher IQ scores. This being said, the High IQ scores were linked to individuals with high levels of worry.

As per iHeart Intelligence website, Dr. Adam Perkins, who is an expert in Neurobiology of Personality at King's College in London, individuals who undergo anxiety may have higher IQ.

"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 then added:

"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.'

Real Time Analytics