The article focuses on several longitudinal studies by psychologist Jerome Kagan and his colleagues. Kagan has found that some babies (about 20% of his simple) are "high-reactive," meaning they kick, writhe, or fuss in response to new stimuli. These babies are more likely to grow into anxious, inhibited, or shy children, and as teens and young adults exhibit differences in brain structure and function. The differences include hypersensitivity in the amygdala, a part of the brain responsible for dealing with danger and new situations. Kagan's research suggests that some people are wired from birth to be more anxious than others.

Henig mentions one subject, known as Baby 19, who in a 1989 experiment "was distressed by novelty - new sounds, new voices, new toys, new smells - and showed it by flailing her legs, arching her back and crying." In a 2004 interview, when she was 15, Baby 19 enumerated in her worries thus:

When I don't quite know what to do and it's really frustrating and I feel really uncomfortable, especially if other people around me know what they're doing. I'm always thinking, Should I go here? Should I go there? Am I in someone's way? ... I worry about things like getting projects done... I think, Will I get it done? How am I going to do it? ... If I'm going to be in a big crowd, it makes me nervous about what I'm going to do and say and what other people are going to do and say. How I'm going to deal with the world when I'm grown. Or if I'm going to sort of do anything that really means anything.

Not all of Kagan's "high-reactive" subjects were this visibly agitated. By adolescence, most of the kids who had feared new things were "getting good grades, going to parties, making friends." But, Henig writes,

There exists a kind of sub-rosa anxiety, a secret stash of worries that continue to plague a subset of high-reactive people no matter how well they function outwardly. They cannot quite outrun their own natures: consciously or unconsciously, they remain the same uneasy people they were when they were little.

At this point, she seems like she's writing from inside my brain. I'm not sure if I was a "high-reactive" baby, though the way my parents shudder when they talk about my infancy makes me think something was off. I wasn't a conventionally shy child either, but I was terrified of things like death, ghosts, lizards in the bedroom (don't ask), and being disliked. By thirteen, I was convinced I had a mysterious illness that was making my hair fall out (I didn't), and my separation anxiety was so severe that I once spent an entire visit to a friend's house pacing, waiting for my parents to come pick me up. But by high school, I kind of had a handle on things. Therapy helped my separation anxiety, and though I still pretty much thought I was dying all the time, I was able to go out, make friends, and have fun. Which is basically where I am today.

As I've said before, people who've just met me tend to describe me as calm. I don't freak out about work, and being with friends usually makes me forget my anxieties, so I rarely seem outwardly upset. But like Baby 19, I have a laundry list of worries coursing through my head on any given day: Do I have swine flu? Could I be pregnant (this one actually started long before I was sexually active — if I had an immaculate conception, I would not only have to raise a child but also convert to Christianity)? Is this cut on my finger going to give me gangrene? Did I offend someone? Did I say something weird? Am I weird?

If the foregoing list is any indication, the answer to the last question is yes. But if Kagan's research is accurate, there are many more people who are "forever anticipating the dropping of some dreaded other shoe." This shoe metaphor is especially apt, given that I tend to become especially anxious after something good happens to me, as though I deserve something bad to even it out. But as I've become aware of this tendency, I find it has less power over me, and I'm able to laugh at myself a little as I start to come down with promotion-related meningitis.

Henig discusses different parenting approaches to dealing with high reactive children, but says, "the best outcome, however it happens, is to rear a child who learns to wrestle his demons on his own." She quotes a 13-year-old subject of Kagan's, who wrote,

Inner struggles pulled at me for years until I was able to just let go and calm myself. For example, when I first heard about the anthrax in Washington, I began to have an upset stomach. I realized it was simply because of my anxiety that I was feeling sick. As soon as I realized that, the stomachache went away. Because I now understand my predisposition toward anxiety, I can talk myself out of simple fears.

Henig writes that, "there are many adults, anxious or not, who can't control their own interior monologues as well as this boy can" — and I'm not quite there yet. I'm still capable of losing sleep over the aforementioned gangrenous finger, and I tend to practice a kind of worry exceptionalism — my past worries may have been irrational, I tell myself, but this one is real. I remain a supporter of SSRI treatment, because it's the only thing that ever really shut up my constant interior hypochondrialogue — but a cautious one, because the side effects eventually made me quit. Nowadays what helps the most is absorbing work (which Henig mentions), being social, and, oddly, reading and writing about anxiety.

Some have complained that contemporary psychological research, especially insofar as it focuses on brain scan and controlled experiment, is cold and unhelpful to the individual sufferer. But for me, there's something immensely calming in finding out about the possible defects in my brain. It provides me with a narrative — I'm feeling this way because I was a high-reactive infant and I now have an oversensitive amygdala. This narrative is obviously imperfect — Henig mentions, for instance, that we're not sure about the connection between amygdala activity and the subjective experience of anxiety — but I like that it locates the source of my anxiety in my brain and not in my parents (who, for the record, always tried everything to help me feel better), or, most frightening of all, in the world. I'm aware that we live in anxiety-producing times (Henig duly mentions the recession), but for me, all times are anxiety-producing, and I like to be reminded that my anxiety really comes not from the outside world, but from inside me. It means I have the power to do something about it — even if I'm not sure what that something is.

Understanding the Anxious Mind [NY Times Magazine]

I will admit to being afraid of almost everything; in some ways, I am a female version of Bob Wiley, taking baby steps to everything. I don't like the dark, don't like certain numbers, don't like horror films, don't like crowds, don't like heights- you name it, I'm probably afraid of it. Yet these are fears that can be conquered for the most part, through practice, exposure, medication, and a general outgrowing of things. The big fears in our lives are usually the easiest to work on, as they can be targeted and broken down into tiny pieces.

And then there are the smaller fears; the ridiculous things we hate to admit to anyone, because they seem so insane and embarrassing. I have a friend who is terrified of clowns, and quite embarrassed about it. "Because I know, logically," she says, "that it's just a dude with makeup on. But it's still so fucking creepy." My younger sister is afraid of "anything with wings" and dreads the springtime, as it signals the return of birds, bees, and moths. It's not a paralyzing fear, just a general sense of being creeped out that she can't seem to outrun.

The Onion piece brings up one of my ridiculous fears: audience participation. When I was in 6th grade, we took a class field trip to see CATS, and as soon as those giant costumed people started roaming up and down the aisle, I had the same reaction as one of the fictional audience members in the Onion piece: "Oh, man, are they? Shit," one audience member was overheard saying as the energetic ensemble began filing down previously unseen stairs and past the front row. "Shit, shit, shit."

I suppose it is a boundary issue: watching the show is one thing. Having the show sit next to you is quite another. I know some people LOVE shows like this, and rave about the interaction, but I still get freaked out, even though everyone teases me for it. This same wave of dread kicks in every time I find myself in a situation where someone suggests "icebreaker games" or when I have to go through the receiving line at a random wedding. Some of us just like to sit back and observe, and it's strange when you suddenly feel the tables being turned on you. Especially when those tables are being turned by performers dressed as giant cats.

So what are your ridiculous fears? And do you have a means of overcoming them?

Oh No, Performers Coming Into The Audience [The Onion]

Yes, "therapy" is something certain ladies do when their sisters have more babies than they do. After getting over her skepticism and seeing a shrink, author Lorna Martin writes, "when my sister reveals another miracle baby is coming, I don't have to feel bad about feeling a little bad." But you don't have to take Martin's word for it — celebs like Halle Berry and Jennifer Aniston are into this therapy thing too! How do you get on the bandwagon? Just ask your friend's therapist for a referral.

Of course, if some of your stress is related to, say, money troubles, and you don't have insurance or can't afford the co-pays, you are SOL — Marie Claire has no advice for you (but Wise Bread has some ideas). Although maybe you could "move to a friend's farm for a year," like Marie Claire writer Justine van der Leun did. Just don't try taking Marie Claire's quiz to see if therapy is right for you — unless one of your big problems is that you "see a pair of Marc Jacobs heels for 75 percent off and keep walking." If that's the case, you should probably ask your friend Jennifer for her shrink's number, you loon.

Seriously, not everyone's problems are cute, and not everyone has the resources of a celebrity at her disposal. For the cash-strapped and struggling, sidebars like "Running into my shrink at the mall" aren't very funny. And a women's magazine running articles on dealing with anxiety is a little bit like when cigarette companies started paying for antismoking ads. Marie Claire isn't nearly as bad as Cosmo (Is your man cheating? Are you infertile? Is your orgasm face ugly?). But it's still chock-full of scary beauty treatments (instead of getting implants, inject goo into your boobs), expensive shit, and ads that say things like "I want a man to get lost in my eyes. NOT in my pores." If you need to relax, start by putting down Marie Claire and picking up something that doesn't make its money convincing you you're not hot enough.

Marie Claire [Official Site]

Lots of anti-antidepressant screeds quickly admit that, of course, really mentally ill people should take medicine, but that the rest of us should just suck it up and deal with our feelings. This stance is wrong-headed because it fails to understand mental illness as a spectrum and instead assumes that everyone who takes drugs is either 100% batshit or an overprivileged sissy. Hanauer takes a better approach, viewing SSRI treatment as a matter of costs and benefits.

For her, Celexa had both. It did in fact, make her feel awesome — she slept better, yelled less, and even finished a novel. But it also made her complacent — "I felt good and didn't want anything to change, to potentially alter my high" — and smug — "if you're so tortured, I'd think, stop whining and medicate!"

Hanauer acknowledges that the second cost may be a widespread one. She says she finds her Celexa-smugness "sobering, especially given the number of Americans now on these meds. Compassion is not something we want to lose on a large scale." But she considers only the personal side effects of her complacency, noting that most of the important and beneficial changes in her life came from dissatisfaction. She never makes the next logical step: most important changes in the world come from dissatisfaction too.

Medication can be an important tool in the treatment of mental illness, but the relief it brings can distract doctors, patients — and policymakers — from problems that still exist. Being poor makes you more likely to get mental illness; so does being a veteran. And so, I suspect, does living in a country that cares as little for its poor and sick as ours does. So while drugs can do wonders — especially for those who can afford them — we need to remember that depression and anxiety come from the world as well as the brain, and that the world needs fixing too.

Club Med [Elle]

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Smaller babies more prone to depression, anxiety later on [EurekAlert!]