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Okay, it's all coming together there.
I'm Angela Duckworth. I'm Mike Mon.
And you're listening to No Stupid Questions.
Today on the show, are there any benefits to neuroticism?
I actually know how this rodeo is going to end and it's going to be okay.
Mike, we are coming to the end of our big five personality series.
Like this is the end. This is the last one.
It's been really fun. We all have personalities and it's been fun to learn more about my own and fun to see how everybody else ranks on all these ocean scales.
We have come to the last letter in ocean and for neuroticism.
And our last question in the series comes from Amanda.
Not my daughter Amanda.
Somebody else named Amanda.
More than my daughter have that name, which is shocking.
It is shocking. I was astonished to learn.
And Amanda asks us, Mike and Angela, I'm pretty much the poster child for neuroticism.
As long as I can remember, I've been stressed.
I worry about everything from war and global warming to whether my friends are mad at me, even though they almost never are.
My father is a psychiatrist, so I was diagnosed with anxiety and OCD pretty early on.
But therapy and meds can only do so much.
I've accepted that this is pretty much who I am.
So I'm wondering if there's any silver lining here.
Are there any benefits at all to being a neurotic person?
Thank you, Amanda. That's a lot.
That is a lot. Well, this goes right to the heart of what big five neuroticism, more recently called negative emotionality, goes right to the heart of what it really is.
I'm going to remind you of the six questions that you and I'm sure Amanda and our listeners took when they took the big five inventory on our website.
So there are three items that sound like Amanda.
I'm someone who worries a lot.
I am someone who tends to feel depressed, blue.
I am someone who is temperamental, gets emotional easily.
And then there were three reverse scored items, meaning if you say, yeah, that's a lot like me, then you actually get a lower neuroticism score.
So I am someone who is emotionally stable, not easily upset.
I am someone who is relaxed, handles stress well.
I am someone who feels secure, comfortable with myself.
I'm going to tell you what I got.
You're not going to be shocked.
I think to hear that I got a very low neuroticism score.
I got a two out of five. I wonder what you scored on this.
I scored a 2.17. We don't have a lot of negative emotionality.
I think though, I know part of what we've talked about is that personality can change and it will continue to change and evolve.
Just even as you were going through the scores, I thought to myself, wow, I am much lower on this scoring chart than I would have been 10 years ago.
And I think that maturing makes me very optimistic because I'm glad that I've been able to change in some of these areas.
Well, our listeners who are probably on average a little bit younger than at least me, they scored a little higher in negative emotionality than we did, which makes sense, given what you personally observed and is generally true, which is that as you get older, you get more emotionally stable, therefore less neurotic.
And the mean score for our listeners was just about the same as the national average for adults.
And that is 2.74 for our listeners, 2.72 for a representative sample of a adult in the United States.
So if you are like me getting older and not younger, I mean one of the things to look for to is that you are in that way.
I don't know about you, but I'm getting older.
I think the very strong trend toward getting more emotionally stable and less neurotic, this is one aspect of personality that everybody cares about.
Like who doesn't care about their emotional life?
I think it's a really profound question.
Like why do I have ups and downs mood swings or why am I the kind of person who really keeps calm and carries on?
First five love that you just quote to keep calm and carry on?
Where did that come from, by the way, other than those really cute things that you can buy on Etsy?
I think it was from the British and World War II, that was kind of the mantra.
Oh yes. Okay, it's all coming together there.
Well, Mike, I have a little bit of history on this aspect of personality and it actually goes really far back to Freud.
Everything goes back to Freud.
And Freud, of course, had this idea that whatever was wrong with you, whether you worried all the time or whether you couldn't stop biting your nails or whether you're having too much sex or you weren't having it almost, anything that could be wrong with you, Freud called a neurosis.
But just that general idea that mental problems were neuroses stuck, honestly, for better or for worse.
And then around World War II, actually, scientists really started measuring personality scientifically.
And that's when the Big Five emerged.
These five types of personality traits.
And this last one that we're talking about, neuroticism was so named because it kind of had the vibe, I guess, of what Freud would call a neurosis.
I think now modern personality psychologists, including me, we call it Big Five negative emotionality because it's a rebrand of Big Five neuroticism.
It's just kind of like a really outdated name.
But I think the heart of being somebody who's high in this Big Five negative emotionality is really two things.
One is just having a lot of negative emotion.
It's not always anxiety.
Sometimes it's like sadness or anger.
And the other aspect is just instability, the ups and downs.
Can I give you an example that I am fascinated by of someone who has pure control of his emotions?
Yeah. So I have a friend named Trevor.
I have a group of friends, I should say, that we get together once a year for a weekend to just adventure and catch up and enjoy one another company.
This last year we were in Southern California and we're headed to the beach and Trevor's wife calls and says, hey, our son is really sick with something.
I'm taking him to the ER.
He was just very calm and collected through the whole thing and he said, well, our oldest child has had so many health issues that we've been through this type of thing so many times, even though this was another one of his children.
He's like, I actually know how this rodeo is going to end and it's going to be okay.
Even though this is a scary moment, they've got great medicine.
We've got great doctors.
We're going to figure it out.
And I thought, what an interesting approach because I was not responding that way even though I was in the car and it wasn't my kid.
But he had developed such emotional stability.
Did you see terms of endearmate the movie with, it was like Deborah, Winger and Shirley McLean?
No, but I'd love to hear about.
I don't know the movie. I honestly could not tell you the plot of this movie, but I remember the opening scene.
I think Shirley McLean comes in to her daughter's room, her daughter is still a baby just like in the crib sleeping beastly and the mother comes over worried, brow furrowed, and the baby's sleeping and like not making a sound.
And she just like shakes the crib and the baby wakes up and starts crying.
And then the mom smiles, sure that the baby is alive and breathing and then leaves the room.
And the scene is meant to symbolize that this is a person who was just so neurotic.
Like, oh my God, is my baby sleeping or is my baby dead?
I think later in the movie, and I may have this wrong because it's been decades since I've seen it, there was some conversation where the idea is that you imagine the worst possible thing that could happen to the person that you love the most.
I won't even describe it, but like you imagine this catastrophic tragic ending.
And then you, in a way, habituate to it and like it makes your everyday pain a little bit easier.
So I bring up this movie that you've never seen because the story that you tell about Trevor actually reminds me a little bit of this.
It's like there is a kind of habituation, if you will, like even if you imagine something you can habituate to the image of it.
And then you kind of have this strength, if you will, or you're not so sensitive when it actually happens.
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's totally true here.
The other thing I just have to add though, because you told me about this movie, I will never forget I'm a pretty new uncle.
This is long, long ago. I am holding my niece and she is really young, like newborn ish and so peaceful and everybody's gone.
It's just me holding her and she's asleep in my arms.
And maybe this is terrible, but twice.
I remember while people were gone, I pinched her to make her wake up because I was so nervous that she seemed so peaceful.
I was like, did she die in my arms?
You were surely McLean.
You were like, are you breathing?
A hundred percent I was.
And to be clear, I've not pinched little kids since I just was very nervous in that moment.
Good, good, because that could be very bad in many ways.
Freud, who probably wasn't very good with babies, I will say.
Freud had this idea that I do think stands a test of time.
Freud thought that everybody in life suffers, that everybody has pain and worry.
And he said, we all have defenses against this pain.
Like you're repressed.
That term you're repressed comes from Freud.
It's an idea that like, oh well, an immature way of dealing with this psychic pain is to deny it and so forth.
It's repression, but there were a variety of mature defenses also.
And you know, there's a psychiatrist at Harvard, in his name is George Valiant.
And he went on to try to understand what the mature defenses are that any of us have against our negative emotionality against our inter psychic pain.
And he named five. Do you think that a lot of maturity is actually learning these?
So when we talked about just now is anticipation.
And that is when you give yourself like a micro dose of something that's hard so that you in a way like are able basically to deal with it more easily later.
So sometimes it just happens to you like your older son has a lot of health issues.
And then when your younger son has health issues, you're stronger.
Yeah, but it can be for anything.
It's just like any big challenge.
If you give yourself a small dose first, then later you won't be overwhelmed.
That's anticipation. When George told me about these, I was like, oh my goodness.
Yeah, no, tell me the five.
So anticipation. And one of them is altruism.
And here's the story that George told me about how altruism can be a defense against neuroticism.
He was doing this very famous longitudinal study where they were following young men for their entire lives.
I believe it was called the Harvard study of adult development.
So at the time George was the person in charge of study and he was interviewing people.
Now they were like late middle age.
And there was a childless couple who had tried all their lives to have a baby and were unable to.
And then there was somebody in this couple's life who was going to have a child.
And the question is like, how do you deal with that pain?
I mean, it's so painful to see people who have what you don't have.
So how do you cope with that wound?
And what the woman did in this couple was she knit a baby sweater for this other couples child.
And George used that as an example of the mature defense of altruism that one way that people manage their pain is that they find a way to find happiness in the happiness of other people essentially by being a giver.
Well, it's interesting.
I think you see this a lot as well when, for example, someone passes away from cancer.
And then so often people want to find meaning in the pain.
Yeah. And so you see so many organizations develop where it's like we're putting together care kits or I have a very dear friend who has an autistic son and his sister has created a program collecting all sorts of different things.
A children with autism use to help get through the day to help cope with various situations.
And so for them, it's finding ways to contribute very altruistically to others who are in a same or similar situations to them.
It really is this beautiful way of making sense of the situation that you have or in the case of a lost loved one from cancer making sense of that pain or creating value for others to say here's something that we're going through together or a shared.
Awful experience, but we can find meaning or joy or purpose in coming together in the experience.
I had a graduate student named Lauren Eskrys-Winkler who grew up to be a professor and when she was in her, I think first year with me, she got really interested in survivor guilt.
So that's when you are maybe the only one who survives a car crash, for example, or a natural disaster and the survivor guilt where you have this like weight on your shoulders, right?
Like why me? I shouldn't be here.
Some people turn into what Lauren called survivor mission and it's exactly what you say.
It's like how can I turn around and help other people who have been through this.
And I think in a way, this idea that yeah, you can have neuroticism.
I mean, like who doesn't, but that you can cope with it is very powerful.
Let me give you another one because all five are interesting and give us all ideas for what we can do.
One of my favorites is sublimation.
The idea of sublimation is that you transform your negative emotional energy into something beautiful.
So you become a musician, you write a poem, you're transforming negative energy into creative energy.
And the story George Valiant would give when he tried to explain these mature defenses to me was Beethoven.
So Beethoven actually had a really unhappy life in many ways.
I think he was deeply lonely.
I don't think he had any successful romantic relationships or even maybe successful friendships.
And then of course he went deaf.
Right. So you know, somebody for whom the only thing he knew how to do was to relate to the world through music.
And I think he was able to continue to compose only because he could play the music in his head.
It was after Beethoven went deaf that he composed the ninth symphony, ode to joy.
And George played it for me because you know, I'm a music naïve.
I was like, what? You listen like, don't don't don't don't don't don't don't don't don't don't don't don't don't don't don't don't don't don't don't don't don't don't don't don't don't don't don't don't don't don't don't don't don't don't don't don't don't don't don't don't don't don't don't don't don't don't don't don't don't don't don't don't don't don't don't
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Hmm. Okay, that's the fourth one.
Oh, what? Yeah, you got it.
Wait comedy is a totally separate one.
Yeah, Humor is absolutely a mature defense and the basic idea is that you take this pain and so forth and you see, you know, basically you see the funny side of it.
You know, you see how absurd it is and you are able to laugh.
And I think so many comedians use comedy as a way to kind of talk through their pain and you see you see you see you see you see you see you see you see you see you see you see you see you see you see you see you see you see you see you see you see you see you see you see you see you see you see you see you see you see you see you see you see you see you see you see you see you see you see you
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and you can take care of neuroticism and you can take care of neuroticism and you can take care of neuroticism and you can see the humor aside and that is actually the last of the matured defenses that I really like because there's one more the fifth matured defense the one I haven't told you about because I don't know if I agree the last of the five matured defenses is suppression wait
didn't you just say that repression was immature and now you're talking about suppression so confusing and honestly I was really confused and it took George I was really confused and it took George I was really confused and it took George I was really confused and it took George I was really confused and it took George I was really confused and it took George I was really
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took George I was really confused and it took George I was really confused and it took George I was Okay, I kind of agree with both of those.
Okay, okay, no, I don't disagree with those.
The way that you get yourself not to eat off someone's plate or kill them when you're mad at them or whatever is that you suppress the urge and I think that like trying to keep a lid on your emotions or like suppress your feelings or suppress your urges I mean we would call that willpower right like we would call that probably one of the things that you have to learn as you
get more mature but to me that's like the least sophisticated way to manage life.
I think it's much healthier to notice your urges understand your urges reframe situations take perspective ask for help change your situation I don't know this last of the mature defenses to me doesn't feel that mature.
There's an old axiom that I've heard which is basically like face it and replace it when it's talking about emotions or something like that not necessarily suppress but like okay I literally just felt this thing or we just felt this thing or we just felt this thing or we just felt this thing or we just felt this thing or we just felt this thing or we just felt this thing
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felt this thing or we just felt this thing or we just felt this thing or we just felt this thing Still to come on no stupid questions, how can neurotic people get out of their heads?
Go out of your apartment, go out into the world.
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Now back to Mike and Angela's conversation about negative emotionality.
So Angela, I'm also thinking, I mean Amanda's asked, you know, what are the benefits to being a neurotic person?
There've got to be some positives to this as well.
I do want to say, and Amanda, I hope you're sitting down, but since your dad's a psychiatrist, you're not going to be surprised.
Let me just begin with the bad news, which is that neuroticism is correlated with a lot of negative life outcomes.
I mean, this isn't going to surprise many people, but generally neuroticism goes hand in hand with earning a lower income, you know, having less wealth over your lifetime, and then also kind of most obviously it's correlated with having lower life satisfaction.
I mean, that's almost total logical to say that people who are high in negative emotionality are less happy.
There's also research on physical health where people who are very high in big five neuroticism tend to not live as long, not live as healthy lives.
I say all of this very tentatively because if you're already high in big five neuroticism, I don't want to make you even more stressed out, but I also want to say you have to worry in life.
If you don't worry, you will never plan ahead, you will never learn from your mistakes, you will never correct yourself.
You know, if you never get sad, then you will never strive to create a full life.
If you don't have emotions that go up and down, that means you are missing a lot of signals from other people in the world.
So, you know, all of these things we have kind of inherited through evolution from our ancestors because they are designed to make us aware of all the threats and the problems that are real.
So, to Amanda and to anybody else who scored really high in negative emotionality, we should say, look, there's good reason to have those adaptations.
And maybe some people would say, hey, I'll keep my high big five neuroticism score as long as I can sublimate and laugh with humor and be an altruist.
And maybe for some people, that's better than being happy, go lucky, you know, rainbows and unicorns person who doesn't have all those mature defenses.
Right. Also, I want to say, one of the five that you didn't bring up in these coping mechanisms with Freud that I would love to ask about is this idea of seeking adventure and like actually trying some of the things that we worry so much about.
But like sometimes there's this fear of doing X or Y or if I have this conversation, it's going to fail.
But if you just go treat it like an adventure, you can start to build up a repertoire of evidence that says, hey, I can do this and I don't have to be so worried or so anxious about all those things, we can be okay.
You know, one really fascinating theory about what's going on with people who tend to be especially high in big five neuroticism is that they are so to speak in their heads.
So there are parts of the brain that are specialized for self-reflection, self-referential thought.
Like if you think about a pen, or a bottle of water, or the state of Iowa, or something, that's not self-referential thought, that's just like thinking about an object or a place, et cetera.
But when you think about yourself, like, you know, what are those people thinking about me?
What was I like when I was 12 years old?
Those are self-referential thoughts and we do have sort of specialized neural machinery for self-referential thoughts.
That's a good thing in many ways.
But one theory of neuroticism is that you can get too much in your head, meaning you can get too inward looking.
And what I like about your idea kind of like, we'll go and try things and so forth.
My friend Samantha Bordman, who is a psychiatrist, when I talked to her about what she sees in her patients, that she's really trying to bring them to a happier place in their life, from a place of worry and remuneration and so forth.
It really is a kind of like, go out of your apartment.
Go out into the world, right?
Like get out of your head.
Sometimes even get out of your journal writing, right?
Just like, go and expose yourself to the sights and the sounds and the birds and the dew on the grass and the road trips and so forth.
And I don't know, there's nothing in my research that speaks to this, but it feels very intuitive to me that maybe we can think too much that we can get too kind of like head down and sometimes what we need is to like pick our heads up and just go do something.
I mean, for me, and I'm not saying this solution to all things, but for me, the literal act of just going outside and reminding myself of the bigger, broader world helps contextualize how small I am in the scheme of things, but also how big and beautiful the world is and how much is out there.
And so honestly, the number one thing in my personal life is the literal act of walking outside.
So that would be your like, you know, if you were going to make a list of the mature defenses, you would say, go do something, go outside and maybe like take a walk.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we talked about this maybe a year ago, but something about the human ability to connect with nature is huge, seemingly healing effects of being outside.
Yeah, and my nature is maybe a little different than yours because I live right by mountains and you walk by a river in a park, but both have that amazing ability to kind of reframe and help us face things and know.
Mike, we are coming to the end of our conversation on Big Five Neuroticism.
We are also at the end of our Big Five personality series.
And I'd like to ask you whether debating and discussing all aspects of how we are in the world has changed anything for you and how you're living your life.
Well, I think you know that I feel very strongly about this idea of locustive control that we can have a major influence on our own lives, that we have the ability to make choices and improve things.
I think my biggest takeaway from all of this is that personality does change and that we can be party to the personality that we want to create for ourselves.
We can grow, we can develop and there are a variety of things that we can do to increase in areas we want to increase, to decrease in areas we want to decrease, that personality is not fixed and we have an opportunity to become better by applying a bunch of these principles that we've talked about both today and in the previous weeks.
I do know this about you, Mike.
And I think it's one of the very first conversations we had of a locustive control.
You are even about to write a book about it.
Am I right? I think that I would love to have a book written that summarizes all that.
I don't know that I'm the right person right.
Also, I want to say just because we brought it up here and I should have said this earlier, the very first time we ever had dinner together, you ate off my plate.
You didn't ask. You just...
Freud would have scolded me.
No, I actually took it. I left and I thought, man, I don't know her that well, but she ate off my plate the first time we ever had dinner.
We must be good friends.
That was my takeaway. We're already feskies.
Well, I don't want to break your bubble, but I eat off a lot of people's plates.
I even ate off of a stranger's plate with permission at a sushi bar because they were leaving one of the really good pieces.
And I was like, excuse me, I just have to say that as you're paying your check, it must be that you're not going to eat the eel.
Would you mind? And they were like, sure, no problem.
Look, I am also somebody who is a fan of having a locustive control, a sense that you're not just being victim of your genetic cards when it comes to your personality.
And for me, what this series has shine to light on is not only that there are all these ways that we can rethink things, like reframe them, but also in some ways, the most important thing we can do is put ourselves into situations that bring out our best.
I'm going to redo from the poem Invictus.
I'm sure you have read this many times.
Of course. It matters not how straight the gate, how charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate.
I am the captain of my soul.
If there were ever an ode to an internal locustive control, this would be it.
But let me just say this, after talking about personality, yours, mine, our NSQ listeners, I would say that this poem could have another stanza and I won't write it now because I can't make it rhyme.
But for me, what this is missing is the idea that one of the ways that you are a master of your fate and the captain of your soul is not just to bear with your circumstances, like deal with the fact that you're a neurotic person, just lower your expectations, keep a stiff upper lip, keep calm and carry on, but that you could choose to be around people who make you happier,
that you could call upon friends and family to help you achieve your goals and to recruit other people and put yourself into cultures where you are a more conscientious person or a more open person or a more agreeable person or a less neurotic person.
So to me, you are the master of your fate and you are the captain of your soul.
But one of the things that a good captain does is to steer the ship and to find the waters that are the best for you.
And to surround themselves with an incredible crew of people who help them be their very best self.
Exactly. And now here's a fact check of today's conversation.
In the first half of the show, Mike says that Keep Calm and Carry On was a slogan used by the British government during World War 2.
The iconic sign featuring the saying was one of three designs created months before the Second World War began in 1939.
The other posters read, your courage, your cheerfulness, your resolution will bring us victory.
And freedom is in peril, defend it with all your might.
However, while the second two posters were distributed widely in the beginning of the war, Keep Calm, Carry On posters were pulped and recycled in order to deal with the looming paper shortage.
The phrase only began to gain public recognition in 2001.
When owners of a bookshop in North umberland, England found one of the surviving posters and a box of books they purchased at an auction and began distributing copies of the image.
Later, Angela says she doesn't think that German composer Ludwig von Beethoven ever experienced a successful romantic relationship or even a friendship.
It's well documented that Beethoven was not the easiest person to get along with, but he did have a small circle of friends with whom he frequently quarreled, including a lifelong relationship with civil servant Stefan von Bräning, whom he met in childhood.
Angela also notes that Beethoven was deaf when he composed his ninth symphony.
However, a Kent State musicologist recently discovered that while Beethoven had impaired hearing at the time he composed this work, he didn't go completely deaf until shortly before his death in 1827.
Finally, Mike references what he believes to be an old adage, quote, You can either cry or laugh when you spill the milk and it's better to laugh than cry.
He appears to be conflating the expression there's no use crying over spilled milk.
With, I laugh because I must not cry.
A quote attributed to President Abraham Lincoln, whose scholars believed dealt with depression and would have likely scored relatively high on the negative emotionality scale.
Humor was clearly one of his mature defenses.
That's it for the fact check.
Before we wrap today's show, let's hear some thoughts about last week's episode on agreeableness.
This is Alyssa from Indianapolis.
I have learned that I am a people pleaser and have become more aware of this the older I get.
I realize now that it's a tendency I need to fight because in general, I in the past have made bad choices mainly when I was trying to make a choice based on what I thought somebody else would want and respecting their ideas more than my own.
But the more I've interacted with people, especially in the workplace and with my own family and my kids getting older, the more I realize that I should respect my own ideas and listen to my gut and make choices based on what I myself can logic out and not trying to guess what other people think would be best.
So I do love being agreeable, I love helping, and I love trying to find solutions that will benefit everybody, but I also need to remember not to just people please, but also to respect my own ideas.
Thanks for a great show.
That was listener Alyssa way.
Thanks to her and to everyone who share their stories with us.
And remember, we'd love to hear your thoughts on neuroticism.
Send a voice memo to NSQ at Freakonomics.com and you might hear your voice on the show.
Coming up next week on those stupid questions, when should parents lie to their kids?
Wait, does the Easter Bunny only shop at CVS Pharmacy?
That's next week on No Stupid Questions.
No Stupid Questions is part of the Freakonomics Radio Network, which also includes Freakonomics Radio, People I mostly admire, and the economics of everyday things.
All our shows are produced by Stitcher and RunBud Radio.
The senior producer of the show is me, Rebecca Lee Douglas, and Lear Kvoudich is our production associate.
This episode was mixed by Greg Ripon.
We had research assistants from Daniel Moritz-Rapson.
Our theme song was composed by Luis Guerra.
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