I cannot remember a time when some large worry has not cast a shadow over my day. As a young child, I would lie awake fearing everything from the impending embarrassment of gym class, to the death of my parents, to the prospect of a nuclear holocaust. The form of my fears may have changed as I age, but the tendency to see disaster on the horizon has remained.
I am far from alone in this: negative mental chatter and doom-laden fantasies are common characteristics of the personality trait “neuroticism”. Like other personality traits, this can measured using simple questions such as:
