But I’d also like to make a positive case for pessimism. Defensive pessimism, specifically. Because if things start going downhill, defensive pessimists will be the ones with their feet already on the brakes.

And what, you may ask, are defensive pessimists? They are people who lean way into their anxiety, rather than repress it or narcotize it or allow it to petrify them into stone. They busily imagine worst-case outcomes and plan accordingly. This tendency can drive their more optimistic friends and relations bananas — defensive pessimists are destroyers of worlds, harshers of mellows — but it is, for the calamity-howler, a constructive adaptation, far more useful than trying to cheer up. There is no cheering up, as far as defensive pessimists are concerned. They reject what the theoretical psychologist Barbara Held calls “the tyranny of the positive attitude.”

“Defensive pessimism is costly in that it doesn’t get rid of your anxiety,” Julie Norem, a professor of psychology at Wellesley College, told me. “But the flip side is that it keeps your mind anchored and focuses you on things you can control.” Which is what distinguishes it from generalized anxiety, garden-variety neuroticism and catastrophizing, by the way. Defensive pessimism is productive.

Norem, who’s been studying defensive pessimism since the early 1980s, told me that she collected her most recent round of data on March 20 — eight days after the World Health Organization deemed Covid-19 a pandemic, but before all but one state, California, had begun enforcing stay-at-home orders. The correlation was clear: The more defensively pessimistic her participants were, the more likely they were to be canceling travel and avoiding public gatherings — or to have done so already.

Had she contacted me, I’d have fallen into that group. I stopped taking the New York City subway on Feb. 26. In March, I avoided all large gatherings, save one in the first week. I Cloroxed groceries; I wiped down light switches; I made awkward excuses not to see friends. It ran contrary to my nature in some ways — I eat food off the floor and hug people by way of greeting — but not in others. When I took Norem’s online quiz, I was told I qualified as a defensive pessimist.