Personality, Everyday Anxiety, and New Ways to Cope

Anxiety impacts a lot of people, and you don’t have to have a diagnosis to feel its effects. According to neuroscientist and author of Good Anxiety, Dr. Wendy Suzuki, even before the pandemic, it was estimated that approximately 90% of the world’s population experienced everyday anxiety.

The term everyday anxiety refers to those nonclinical anxious feelings that occasionally keep you up at night or uncomfortably distracted during the day. For some of us, these feelings may go beyond happening occasionally and simply come to feel like a part of who we are. We adopt the word anxious into our self-identity and go about our daily lives, learning to coexist with the discomfort.

In this article, we’re going to take a look at the personality traits – spoiler alert: there’s one in particular – that most contribute to everyday anxiety. We’re also going to propose a different way to think about your anxious brain and offer certain coping mechanisms that you possibly haven’t thought of before.

At this point, it’s worth mentioning that if your anxiety is overwhelming and interfering with your day-to-day life, you might want to seek professional care or guidance. This article is not intended to help diagnose or treat generalized anxiety disorder or any other clinical anxiety issue.

A Shift in Paradigm: Anxiety as a Physical Reaction

We nearly always think of anxiety as an emotion, something verified by the American Psychological Association in their description of it. But they also recognize that anxiety causes changes in one’s physical body as well, describing increased blood pressure, dizziness, and sweating. Other well-known physical symptoms may include digestive problems and headaches.

So, yes, anxiety is undeniably emotional. But it’s also important to acknowledge the physical side of what is going on in your brain to cause such a terribly uncomfortable mix of symptoms.

It all starts when your body’s fight-or-flight response is inadvertently set off. This might happen if your active imagination goes into overdrive, for example, or if you become worried about a difficult situation that a close friend or loved one might be dealing with. Whatever the trigger, this instinctual reaction sets off a whole slew of sensations.

The fight-or-flight response was essential for keeping humans alive when we were running around vulnerable to a vast and dangerous wilderness. We had to be hypervigilant for our own survival. We’ve come a long way since then, but despite our social and cultural evolution, we never outgrew this very real physical instinct to protect ourselves from danger. An active stress response was an advantage for survival – and evolved over millennia to get us to where we are today.

The problem is that we now live in much safer times, and our fight-or-flight instinct doesn’t quite differentiate whether a threat is real or in our heads. According to our brains, things like deadlines, other people’s feelings, or juggling an all-too-heavy mental load are just as valid threats as being stalked by wolves.

The Key Tendencies That Underlie Anxiety

The interplay between personality and anxiety is still not 100% clear. Certain tendencies are strongly correlated with specific aspects of someone’s personality type, but it’s impossible to say that these tendencies cause anxiety – some professionals make the case that anxiety is what drives these characteristics to the forefront of someone’s personality. It’s kind of like the chicken-and-egg scenario – it’s impossible to tell which comes first. This ambiguity is why it’s essential to maintain a nuanced perspective while exploring the link between personality and anxiety.

That said, the following tendencies are often associated with anxious feelings.

Reservedness

Those who prefer quiet (and private) reflective time rather than a constant flow of social interactions may feel at odds in societies that value the opposite. This need for space may lead to difficulties making friends, feelings of social awkwardness, and struggles with confidence.

Overthinking

Some people may find themselves overthinking, mulling something over from every single angle and then doing it again backward. Once a thought gets stuck in their mind, it’s hard for them to distract themselves from their mental musings. This can become an issue when certain thoughts come to dominate their mind. Maybe they’re ruminating on all the things that they should have said in a recent conversation, thinking about how they are going to afford a trip that they have coming up, or something of the like – overthinking can be a distracting interruption to life.

Active Imagination

While an active imagination can be a real asset, it can also be a burden for some people – easily leading to a whole new level of overthinking. Imaginative minds can quickly come up with worst-case scenarios, intricate plans that may be impossible to fulfill, and elaborate interpretations of reality. All this can lead to feelings of worry and a sense of not quite being in control of their lives. It can also cause them to perceive threats where there are none, a key factor in activating the anxiety response.

Empathy

When someone deeply shares in the emotions of the people around them, they may partake in the anxiety of others as well. They could also experience independent anxiety out of concern for another person’s well-being. Empathetic people tend to worry about how their decisions impact others around them, which frequently causes feelings of guilt, disappointment, and even fear.

Resistance to Change

People who have a hard time adapting to new situations or circumstances and who generally like to keep things the way they’ve always been often experience anxiety in the face of change. This resistance applies to practical matters, like moving to a new city, as well as more internal issues, such as knowing that they should work on certain facets of their lives but resisting doing so.

Perfectionism

Both a blessing and a curse, perfectionism can drive a person to achieve incredible things, but it can also stop them in their tracks before they ever get started. Anxiety-related issues that can stem from perfectionism include overwhelm, exhaustion, fear of failure, and a lowered sense of self-esteem or self-worth.

So, Which Personality Traits May Be Linked to Anxiety?

First off, it needs to be reiterated that no given personality trait necessarily causes anxiety.

But all those tendencies listed above are linked to certain aspects of our personality. Reservedness is tied to the Introverted personality trait but does not automatically indicate that all Introverted types are anxious. Overthinking and having an active imagination are linked to the Intuitive trait. An empathetic nature is associated with Feeling personalities. Whether someone is resistant to change or not is influenced in different ways by the Observant, Thinking, and Judging personality traits. Perfectionism is often associated with the Turbulent trait.

You can see that each of the five personality aspects are linked to different tendencies that can potentially lead to anxiety. But it’s this last one – the Turbulent trait – that has the most overarching influence on a person’s tendency toward stress and everyday anxiety.

Turbulent Personalities and Anxiety

The Turbulent trait indicates a generalized predisposition for a person to have a more active stress response. Turbulent individuals are more conscious of how they fit into their surroundings and vigilant about the potential challenges that they may have to deal with.

When someone with a Turbulent personality type thinks about the future, for example, it’s often with a sense of worry. They like to feel in control of life’s changes, but when they have to confront difficult situations or obstacles, they may doubt their ability to do so. They are also more sensitive to the emotions of others and slightly more likely to fall into the trap of overactive imaginings.

Across the board, Turbulent personality types are significantly more likely to become stressed out to the point of anxiety. It’s almost as if this trait were a filter through which they interact with the world, acting as a modifier for the other traits. A Turbulent, Intuitive type, for example, might spend a significant amount of time thinking about what-if scenarios, but those scenarios likely provoke discomfort about negative potentials more than a sense of positive inspiration.

If you have a “-T” tacked onto the end of your personality type acronym, try not to feel deflated. You are not destined to “battle” everyday anxiety for the rest of your life.

If you haven’t yet, be sure to take our free personality test to learn which personality type you have.

Reigning It In: Long-Term Coping Skills for Everyday Anxiety

For Turbulent personality types, or for anyone who experiences anxious feelings, it might help to recognize the stress response as the instinctual reaction that it is. Acknowledging its physical nature may make it easier to self-regulate through the physiological and emotional experience of everyday anxiety.

But even if you shift the way that you think about how and why you experience anxiety, it’s still useful to have some practical strategies for dealing with it.

Deep breathing, yoga, getting plenty of physical activity, and keeping a journal are all well-known coping mechanisms. And while activities like these may certainly help you feel less anxious, we’d like to suggest some new coping strategies that you may not have considered before.

Strengthen the Objective Brain

One of the amazing things about our brains is that we can become aware of our thoughts and patterns of thinking simply by paying attention to them. Once we start to see things for what they are, we can name what we are experiencing, describe it, and observe ourselves from a more objective perspective.

This allows us to recognize and describe when those fight-or-flight alarm bells start going off. We can say to ourselves, “My heart is racing because of the rush of adrenaline that I am feeling in my body.”

This sort of thinking also allows you to name your emotions and identify the thoughts generated by your active imagination or overthinking. In short, it helps balance anxious tendencies with the power of logic.

This may be more difficult for Feeling personality types, whose default is to let their heart take the lead. Fortunately, our brains are fairly moldable. Even if it feels contradictory to your nature, this kind of logical approach to anxiety can be learned. Certain activities, such as this exercise from the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, are excellent for training your brain for self-awareness and objectivity.

Adopt a Growth Mindset

Your anxiety is not a fixed part of your personality – it is a reaction to a trigger. In order to move past it, you must believe that your intelligence and mental and emotional capabilities will allow you to grow and evolve beyond whatever is alerting your fight-or-flight response. To minimize anxiety’s recurrence, it helps to be willing to see the areas of your life that may need adjusting and to be willing to work toward making necessary changes.

It might help to think about your anxiety less like a problem and more like a teacher. What is your anxiety trying to show you? What about your life is causing your fight-or-flight instinct to be triggered over and over again? Decide to be curious about the problem that’s triggering the anxiety.

Anxiety will show you one opportunity for growth after another. A growth mindset allows you to seize those opportunities and make positive change.

Tap Into Your Personality’s True Needs

This is where the study of personality theory can really help people who struggle with everyday anxiety. When you explore your personality traits, you can more readily identify what your natural needs are. You can also discover strengths that you never knew you had and gain perspective on those “weak” spots that may be causing the friction underlying your anxiety. This knowledge will also help you identify additional coping strategies that may be just what you need to minimize anxious feelings.

Introverted types who have to make their way in an Extraverted workplace, for example, might find themselves struggling as they try to juggle water-cooler conversations or after-hours social gatherings. Recognizing their needs as legitimate in their own minds and then respecting their natural preferences may help them feel more comfortable in taking the downtime that they need to relieve anxious feelings.

Develop a Resilience Mentality

This isn’t exactly a coping mechanism but rather an invitation to embrace your anxiety rather than view it as a curse.

Anxiety, if you let it, can be a stepping stone toward building greater emotional resilience. The experience of successfully moving through anxious thinking prepares you for more difficult situations that may present themselves in the future. Think of it as emotional weight lifting. Every time that you are able to self-regulate through anxiety, you get better at doing so.

It’s Time to Take Ownership

Even though Turbulent personality types are more likely to suffer from anxiety, almost everyone deals with the everyday variety of anxious thinking at some point in their lives. It’s not exclusive to any one specific trait or combination of traits.

Your brain has an impressive drive to keep you safe. Becoming aware of this instinct, understanding it, and letting it draw your attention to the facets of your life that may need reworking can be transformational. A new mindset toward anxiety combined with the insights gained from the study of personality theory may be just what you need to find balance and perspective in this stress-inducing world.