Neuroticism is the psychological term given to one of the big five personality traits. It encompasses all the negative emotions of a human being. A person sensitive to negative emotions is considered to have high neuroticism. This subject is surprisingly uncommon and not well understood. I am not a psychologist. But I have studied human emotions to an extensive degree while spending years counselling and observing methadone patients before moving on to management. Here is what you should know.
Before reading further, read this THREAD for some background information on this subject. I’m going to steer away from all the general information you can look up elsewhere with regards to the health concerns of neuroticism. My aim in this short post is to deliver this topic from a psychoanalytic perspective and demonstrate how it affects your life.
Your Neuroticism Is Not You
If we take a step back and use the concept of psychoanalytic theory, we can label all our emotions as our ‘other selves’. The reason why I do this is because it separates the way we behave when we are in character, as oppose to when we regret a certain action. And I think the best way to approach your neuroticism is to understand its degree of impact through the frequency of your regrets.
Regret occurs more often when our actions are accommodated with emotions. And you can loosely interpret this as; if a regrettable action is accommodated by an emotion, that means the emotion must stem from a desire that conflicts with my own desire. Otherwise I would not regret it. Isolating your emotions as separate personalities also makes it easier to practice shadow integration, as it identifies actions executed by your regrettable, ‘other’ personalities in which you are not responsible for. It goes without saying that every individual must obviously be held accountable for their actions. But in a psychoanalytic sense, the assumption is ‘the actions you regret are not you’. So who are they? In simple terms; they are your sub-personalities each with their own emotions and desires different to yours.
Negative Emotions Makes You Regret Your Choices
If you are prone to neuroticism, you will find that most of your choices are made emotionally. You experience frequent intense reactions every time things don’t go your way. Your reaction to setbacks will predominantly be emotional, leading to consequences and regrets. But it’s not just negative emotions. People who scale high on positive emotions (extroverts) are also prone to regrets. The fundamental difference between the two is; regret experienced through positive emotions is generally a consequence of doing something stupid or risky. Whereas regret experienced through negative emotions stems from lashing out of anxiety, resentment and fear.
Empirical observation indicates that those with large variances in their emotions are more prone to regrets and poor decision making. So from a personality perspective; disagreeable introverts with low neuroticism seem to be the most ideal and stable archetypes.
Negative Emotions Lowers Stress Tolerance
One of the weakest points of high neuroticism is the ability to tolerate stress. Your stress tolerance will spill on to every part of your life, whether its your lifestyle, career, and family relations. It does not discriminate and will adversely affect every domain of your life. Your failure to tolerate stress halves your effectiveness against the challenges you want to accomplish. You will opt to request more time and approach tasks incrementally within the sphere of your comfort zone. Rather than aim for maximum efficiency despite the overwhelming pressure & discomfort, you will find sanctuary in slow, comfortable conditions. This behavior also motivates you to work in cooperative business environments over competitive fields, which largely determines whether you can ascend the dominance hierarchy or not. Read this POST that explains what personalities best suit career pathways.
Negative Emotions Damage Your Decision Making
Truth and reality often go hand in hand. And they are both harsh, intolerant and unfair; everything that worsens negative emotions under neuroticism. Consequently, people with high neuroticism tend to avoid the demands of reality. They prefer to imagine alternative favorable scenarios and mental role-plays that simply lack any realistic utility. And they also pay a high price for circumventing reality during disruptive changes (eg 2008 Global Financial Crisis, COVID-19).
Negative Emotions Prevents You From Taking Risks
I can argue that it’s probably a good thing to be able to detect danger and potential harm by being risk averse. But high neuroticism flat lines you from taking any risk at all. And without risk, there is no reward. This particular setback also contributes largely in your prevention of climbing up the dominance hierarchy. Capitalizing on any opportunity constitutes large exposure to risk. And those who can effectively seize opportunities will comfortably take risks.
Negative Emotions Can Make You More Agreeable
Your sensitivity to negative emotions will steer you away from confrontation. It will compel you to opt for dishonest harmony over challenging uncomfortable truths. On a long enough time frame, I believe this weakness to be the most catastrophic to your character. The more you agree out of necessity to preserve your comfort, the less you become who you are. The separation of who you are, and what you’ve become as a consequence of succumbing to societal conditioning, is equivalent to death in my opinion.
Is It Possible To Lower Neuroticism?
If you score 100% on neuroticism, will it be possible to bring it down to 50%? The answer is no. Genetics plays a large role with who you are within the domain of the five personalities. You cannot desensitize yourself to your negative emotions on a macro scale that makes up your neuroticism. But you don’t need to. What you should do is break up your neuroticism into micro sub-personalities, isolate, divide and conquer. If anger overshadows your neuroticism, then it is absolutely possible to low your anger through shadow integration. Using this procedure will enable you to eliminate the ugliest, most damaging parts of your neuroticism.
Controlling Your Neuroticism through Shadow Integration Method
If you want to lower parts of your neuroticism that has the biggest adverse effect on your life, you will need to apply psychoanalytic separation of emotions and shadow integration. The process is long and tiring, but it is the most effectiveness method in lowering negative emotions. Think of the process like doing yoga but in a interactive manner where you voluntarily stimulate a negative emotion through a trigger (usually discomfort) with the purpose of suppressing it. Through systemic desensitization you will allow yourself to eventually integrate your negative emotion and re-channel it. I will be doing consultation and exercises with members with regards to shadow integration in the lobby.
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Unmodern Men
