A Look on the Lighter Side: No need to worry — genius help is on the way

Judy Epstein

There is wonderful news on the Lighter Side this week.

According to Dr. Adam Perkins, a neurobiologist at King’s College, London, it is not a bad thing if you suffer from constant worrying. Instead, it might be evidence that you are, in fact, a creative genius.

“I knew it!” I said triumphantly, turning to my skeptical spouse. “You see this? I’m not a worrywart after all — I’m a genius. Now what do you say to that?”

“I’m worried it might go to your head,” he replied, turning the next page of his book, “Boring Topics in Engineering.”

“You’re just jealous,” I said, “because nobody’s saying you’re a genius. But if you worry enough about it, you can be a genius, too.”

“I’ll leave that to you,” he responded. “It’s your gift, not mine.”

He’s right. If hatching extravagant worries where no one else sees danger is a gift, I’ve got it.

For example, I used to worry every time I stepped on a manhole cover. Not that it would fall in, but that it would shoot up into the air, powered by a subterranean steam pipe explosion, at the exact moment when I stepped onto it. At least that death would be quick.

Sometimes I cross city streets in mid-block. And, of course, I look both ways for traffic. But mostly I worry that, just as I’ve stepped between the bumpers of two parked cars, someone way down the block might start their car, pushing all the other cars along in time to trap me and pinch me off at the knees.

In elevators, I think about the odds that I might drop my phone right down the shaft, just as the doors are closing. This makes me rummage in my purse to make sure my phone is secure — which probably makes me even more likely to drop it.

Some people — a spouse, for example — might say that elaborate fears like these are absurd.

But according to Dr. Perkins, “If you have … high levels of spontaneous activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, governing conscious perception of threat, and you also have a tendency to panic due to 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.”

In other words, “This could mean that, for specific neural reasons, high scorers on neuroticism have a highly active imagination.”

In short: I’m a genius!

On airplanes, I worry about everything — the wings, the engines, the strange bumping noises.

“That’s just the landing gear retracting,” my husband says in his calmest voice.

“But what if they can’t go down again, when we need them?” I say.

“Then they’ll cover the runway with foam.”

“What if they don’t have enough foam?”

“They’ll borrow some.”

I have always requested the middle seat, when there is one. “I want you to reserve it,” I told my travel agent.

“No need,” she’d say. “No one else wants it.”

But I didn’t want an aisle seat, in case luggage fell out on my head during turbulence and I didn’t want the window, in case it broke and sucked me out of the plane.

One time there was water dripping on me from the compartment above my seat. “Oh, that’s just condensation from the air conditioning,” said the stewardess.

But I wasn’t comforted. I just worried: “If they can’t even maintain the air conditioning, how can they possibly manage the engines?”

If you think all this worry is tough on my husband, just think how tiring it is for me.

It drove me to taking Valium, at least for air travel. But, of course, I worry about that too. “What if I get hooked?”

“Taking two pills a year? Have you gotten hooked so far?”

“No — but you never know when it might strike.”

At one point in my life, I managed to worry both that I was pregnant and that I was sterile, at the same time. (I was neither, as it turned out.)

“But wouldn’t those two worries at least cancel each other out?” you might ask.

The answer is, no, they do not. That’s not how worry works.

But, of course, Dr. Perkins knows the truth. All these things are simply proof of my vivid imagination. I may not paint masterpieces or invent new branches of mathematics — but I can picture horrendous scenarios that would never occur to anyone else.

I’m gifted!

I can live with that.

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