Relationship between worry and mental health

To continue with the theme of a previous post, I wanted to look a little further into how climate change affects mental health. Specifically, the topic for today is how worrying about climate change relates to mental health. In the field of psychology, we tend to view worry as “bad” and would probably make the assumption that a person who spends a lot of time worrying about climate change has poor mental health. In fact, if they worry about other topics (war, hunger, etc.), we may even think that they have generalized anxiety disorder. However, the relationship between worry and mental health does not appear to be as simple as this interpretation.

First of all, there is more than one type of worry. Boehnke et al. (1998) distinguish between two types of worries: microworries and macroworries. For microworrying, the object of the worry would be the self or people close to the self (parents, spouse, etc.). With macroworrying, the object of the worry is external to the self and is relevant to a wider group of people (climate change, war, etc.). Previous researchers have found that microworry is related to poor mental health outcomes (Boehnke et al., 1998; Schwartz et al., 2000); whereas macroworry shows a small association with indicators of positive mental health (Griffin & Prior, 1990). During the cold war, mental health professionals worried about how the threat of a nuclear bomb would influence society’s mental health. They expected to find that the greater one appraised the threat of nuclear war, the more troubled the person would be. However, several studies have found that the same people who reported above average well-being were the same people who believed the level of threat to be the highest. This suggested that it may only be people with enough cognitive and emotional resources who can afford to acknowledge the true level of threat (Schwartz & Melech, 2000).

So a certain level of well-being makes it more likely that one will acknowledge macrolevel problems, and, presumably, be concerned about them. Another component to the relationship between worry and well-being may be how one reacts to the worry. An individual who has a degree of concern and takes action by becoming involved in activism would seem likely to fare better than one with a high degree of concern who takes no action besides worrying. A recent study attempted to answer the question of how activism over time relates to macro and microworry (Boehnke & Wong, 2011). The authors found that for those who appraised a high level of nuclear threat in 1985, being involved in activism made the difference in terms of mental health in midadulthood. Those who were involved saw a steeper decline in microworries (which was related to poor mental health) compared to those who did not become involved with activism.

Unfortunately we do not know whether being involved in activism caused the better mental health outcome, or whether there is something different about those who become involved in activism in the first place. I think its likely that people who become involved in activism have a high degree of agency and belief in their ability to change things that would relate to better mental health outcome across the lifespan regardless of level of worry. That being said, for someone who has a high level of concern, I would have to think that doing something proactive about it would relate to a better prognosis over time. As much as our brains seem to think otherwise, rumination is never productive and we tend to feel better when we focus on what we can control. So for all the time one might spend worrying about climate change, if one is not going to do anything about it, that person may as well deny that it is happening and just try to be happy. A really interesting study would be to find out what happens to people with a high degree of concern, but low level of agency, who become involved in activism work. Does this lead to less worry over time and better mental health? Or would people with low agency feel even worse trying to do something for which they don’t have a natural predisposition? In conclusion, not all worry is bad (rejoice, neurotics!); if it inspires one to action it could be helpful and we would certainly not want to live in a society without macroworriers. At least I wouldn’t!