Can being neurotic reduce your risk of death?

Sunday, February 11, 2024.

Here’s an interesting finding. Being neurotic, under certain circumstances, might offer an unexpected boon to your physical health.

Being neurotic can reduce the risk of death, research finds.

It may be that a lot of worrying — part of being neurotic — is helpful in keeping you alive.

However, here’s the caveat…this beneficial effect was only seen for humans in either fair or poor health.

In other words, neurotic people with good health saw no ongoing health benefit from their tendency to fret and worry.

Professor Catharine R. Gale, who led the research, said:

“Our findings are important because they suggest that being high in neuroticism may sometimes have a protective effect, perhaps by making people more vigilant about their health.”

Neurotic people have a tendency towards:

• frustration.

• nervousness.

• worry and anxiety.

• and, of course, guilt.

Worry is protective…

Previous research has found mixed results on the link between neuroticism and mortality. We now know that’s because of this apparent bifurcation in the experience of neuroticism. It seems that if you have reason to be vigilant about your health, neuroticism has a protective effect in these infectious times.

Professor Gale explained:

“When we explored this further, we found that this protective effect was only present in people who rated their health as fair or poor.

We also found that people who scored highly on one aspect of neuroticism related to worry and vulnerability had a reduced risk of death regardless of how they rated their health.”

The conclusions come from data from over half a million humans aged 37 to 73.

All had completed personality questionnaires and were ranked whether they were in excellent, good, fair, or poor health overall.

Professor Gale summed up her findings:

“Health behaviors such as smoking, exercise, diet and alcohol consumption did not explain any part of the link between high scores on the worry/vulnerability facet and mortality risk.

We had thought that greater worry or vulnerability might lead people to behave in a healthier way and hence lower their risk of death, but that was not the case.”

Does this research contradict earlier research?

The findings of another research project revealed that extraverts had the highest expression of pro-inflammatory genes. These are the genetic markers designed to fight off infections.

However, this study from Gale et al. isn’t about susceptibility to infection, it’s about a prudent tendency favoring health maintenance.

Live well, stay kind, and Godspeed.

RESEARCH:

Gale, C. R., Čukić, I., Batty, G. D., McIntosh, A. M., Weiss, A., & Deary, I. J. (2017). When Is Higher Neuroticism Protective Against Death? Findings From UK Biobank. Psychological Science, 28(9), 1345-1357. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797617709813

Marsland, A. L., Cohen, S., Rabin, B. S., & Manuck, S. B. (2001). Associations between stress, trait negative affect, acute immune reactivity, and antibody response to hepatitis B injection in healthy young adults. Health Psychology, 20(1), 4–11. https://doi.org/10.1037/0278-6133.20.1.4