THE UPSIDE OF ANXIETY

HOW TO WORRY WELL

- Patricia Pearson

I AM AN ANXIOUS TRAVELER. I arrive at airports and train stations extra early. I triple-check all my documents, and feel a tightness in my jaw, a slight clench in my stomach, until I've arrived where I'm going. Non-anxious people tease me for being a nervous Nellie.

I used to feel bad about my anxiety, seeing it as irrational, weak. But not anymore. I could write a book on this subject-actually, I did: A Brief History of Anxiety (Yours and Mine). I've learned to respect my tendency to be hypervigilant.

Recently, I was driving along a country road at the start of a long trip that would mainly be on a major highway. I began feeling that something could go wrong. What if I run out of gas? I worried, even though I still had plenty. So when I spied a gas station just before the on-ramp I was going to take onto the highway, I gave in to my angst and decided to fill up. Just in case.

And that's when I discovered that one of my front tires was badly deflated. If I'd overpowered my sense of unease, talked down my anxiety, the tire would have blown out at high speed on the highway. My nagging urge to plan ahead even though it wasn't strictly necessary saved me from a potentially catastrophic scenario.

A GROWING NUMBER of psychologists and neuroscientists are getting out the message that anxiety and other negative feelings have a positive role to play in our lives. Tracy Dennis-Tiwary, who recently published Future Tense: Why Anxiety Is Good for You (Even Though It Feels Bad), thinks our culture goes overboard in demonizing difficult emotions.

She knows what it's like to get swamped from time to time by anxiety.