Worrying ourselves to death?

Can’t stop worrying? Be careful — you just might worry yourself to death. Literally. A new study, sponsored by the National Institute on Aging, shows that people with neurotic personality traits have a higher risk for premature death compared to their cooler counterparts.

“Part of the reason is that certain personality traits — in this case neuroticism — lead us to engage in certain behaviors that are bad for our health,” says the study’s lead researcher, Daniel Mroczek, a psychology professor at Purdue University.

Smoking is a particularly common and deadly bad behavior.

In fact, the study — which monitored 1,788 men over a 30-year period — showed that up to 40 percent of the deaths among the highly neurotic were because of smoking. It was published in a recent issue of the Journal of Research in Personality.

But how about the remaining 60 percent?

Mr. Mroczek suspects that many of the remaining deaths were caused by the physiological damage that follows in the wake of sustained high levels of stress hormone, such as cortisol.

“We know that cortisol damages arteries and the hippocampus,” says Mr. Mroczek, who is planning a paper later this year on the connection between high levels of cortisol and physiological damage.

He also is looking at the effects of other bad habits, such as stress eating. (Drinking as a way to alleviate stress and worry was not shown to have a significant association with mortality.)

But why would humanity include a personality trait that damages the arteries and brain?

Neurotic personality traits probably were essential for survival, says professor Douglas Kenrick, an evolutionary psychologist at Arizona State University.

“Some degree of proneness to anxiety would have been adaptive to the extent that it helped our ancestors avoid dangerous situations, reducing the chances of physical harm or of acting in ways that could have hurt their status in their groups,” Mr. Kenrick says.

In a technologically advanced, postindustrial society, however, some of these same anxieties often can be maladaptive, Mr. Kenrick says. For example, fear of heights made sense thousands of years ago, but it’s hardly conducive to air travel.

Of course, recognizing the harm of neuroticism is one thing, treating it quite another.

Mr. Mroczek says his research can help in the treatment of high-anxiety persons whose surges of negative emotions sometimes threaten to consume them.

“If we can identify who is prone to do damage to their body, it’s easier to target and design a treatment,” Mr. Mroczek says. “It could be part of a preventative care program provided by employers.”

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