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A Neuroscientist Explains How to Turn Your Anxiety Into a Superpower
We tend to think of anxiety as a bad thing, and it certainly can be. Clinical anxiety disorders can be debilitating, and, as many of us have discovered during the pandemic, even high levels of everyday, garden-variety anxiety are pretty darn unpleasant.
But if anxiety is just mental torture, why did humans evolve to be so prone to worry? Anxiety, it turns out, has upsides (even in the modern world where we’re not running from predators all the time). Science has shown that worrying more helps people take sensible precautions, feel more grateful for the good in their lives, and can even boost your memory.
The key to reaping these benefits is controlling both the quantity of your anxiety and how you react to it. Chronic stress will slowly kill you (and quickly kill your joy), but the right amount of stress channeled the right way can give you superpowers, according to neuroscience.
Anxiety can actually be a superpower.
That’s the contention of New York University neuroscientist Wendy Suzuki, at least. Suzuki is the author of a new book, Good Anxiety, which, as the title implies, argues that anxiety can actually be a positive force in our lives. In a recent interview with the Greater Good Science Center’s Kira Newman, Suzuki even…
