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If you’ve dealt with crippling anxiety before, there is a silver lining to the horrible feeling of worry.

A study reportedly suggests that among the people diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder, high IQ scores were associated with high levels of worry, according to the publication Live Science.

Although worrying excessively might be disabling for those suffering from anxiety, “every so often there’s wild-card danger. Then, that excessive worry becomes highly adaptive,” stated Dr. Jeremy Coplan, study researcher and professor of psychiatry at State University of New York Downstate Medical Center.


“People who act on the signals of that wild-card danger are likely to preserve their lives and the lives of their offspring,” explained Coplan.

In a different, more recent study that was in the edition of the journal Personality and Individual Differences also came with the same association between anxiety and intelligence. The 126 undergrad participants were reportedly given a litany of surveys and questionnaires in order to measure both their intelligence and how much they tended to stress about events in their lives, according to the Huffington Post.

Alexander Penney of Ontario’s Lakehead University and his team reportedly found that anxiety is linked to more than just a high IQ. Penney found that the verbally intelligent were reportedly more inclined to be plagued by their memory while those who were better at picking up on non-verbal cues are able to pick up more information in the moment.

“It is possible that more verbally intelligent individuals are able to consider past and future events in greater detail, leading to more intense rumination and worry,” explained Penney.

He continued, “Individuals with higher non-verbal intelligence may be stronger at processing the non-verbal signals from individuals they interact with in the moment, leading to a decreased need to re-process past social encounters.”