Relatively high anxiety in patients with GAD predicted high IQ whereas relatively low anxiety in controls also predicted high IQ. That is, the relationship between anxiety and intelligence was positive in GAD patients but inverse in healthy volunteers.
Interestingly, there was no significant correlation between stress and IQ, although stress was significantly correlated with EI and EI was significantly correlated with IQ. The correlations between stress and EI.
Intelligence and anxiety may have evolved together as mutually beneficial traits, research finds. This may help to explain why people with a high IQ also tend to have higher levels of anxiety. The benefit may be that intelligence allows people to better imagine what might go wrong.
There are many possible reasons why. People with higher IQs often have an increased sense of awareness, deeper levels of empathy, or a fear of failure — all may result in more worry and stress. But anxiety isn't always an obstacle, and it can offer many benefits.
Some of these signs include a strong desire for learning, excellent problem-solving skills, and the ability to think outside the box. Highly intelligent individuals are often curious and have a great capacity for absorbing and processing information quickly and effectively.
Outside influences such as low motivation or high anxiety can occasionally lower a person's IQ test score. So, up to approximately 10 IQ points difference in scores can be accounted for by measurement error and performance variability, but stressors can potentially result in larger differences.
It's the classic sign of the Dunning-Kruger effect, a type of cognitive bias described by social psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger in which people believe they're smarter and more skilled than they actually are.
High IQ people are likely to be flexible, curious, and open-minded. But because personality traits can vary widely among people with high IQ, there aren't necessarily clear outward signs that indicate that someone has high IQ.
Lack of Sleep Won't Make You Smarter
A study published in the journal Sleep found that sleep is important for cognitive performance and that individuals who have better sleep quality tend to have higher intelligence scores.
However, intelligence has drawbacks too. For example, studies have found that higher IQ is associated with more and earlier drug use. Studies have also found that higher IQ is associated with more mental illness, including depression, anxiety, and bipolar disorder.
Research suggests that highly intelligent people get bored easily and spend more time thinking, behaviour that comes across as 'laziness'. A study by the Florida Gulf Coast University looked at a group of 'thinkers' and 'non-thinkers', studying their activity levels over the course of a week.
Positive signs of high intelligence. Research shows that the signs of intelligence are usually good memory and thinking ability, good attitude and hard-working nature, general and tacit knowledge, language proficiency and reasoning, decision-making, trust, creativity, achievements, good intuition, and problem-solving.
Talking to yourself, it turns out, is a sign of genius. The smartest people on earth talk to themselves. Look at the inner monologues of the greatest thinkers. Look at poetry!
More Likely To Perform Poorly On IQ Tests With Depression
Another school of thought is that depression and intelligence are related, but depression negatively impacts cognitive function and causes a low IQ score on the test.
Instead, it usually is diagnosed as generalized anxiety disorder. The term "high-functioning anxiety" represents people who exhibit anxiety symptoms while maintaining a high level of functionality in various aspects of their lives.
Essentially, the genes underpinning depression and intelligence appear to work in haphazard ways — sometimes the more depressed an individual is, the worse their cognitive function; other times, the more depressed, the higher their brainpower.
Souza's study demonstrated that an individual with an IQ of 126 or higher can often learn in one hour what it would take someone with an IQ in the standard range 4-5 hours to learn. This means that gifted people can truly read and understand faster than an average person.
But genetics can explain the wide range of possible IQs too because so many different genes are involved in developing and running a brain. It is possible, for example, to inherit all the higher IQ genes from each parent and leave the lower IQ ones behind. Now the child will be brighter than the parent.
Throw social commitments into the mix, and there's limited time to be alone and be still with your thoughts and creative process. It's common for people with genius qualities to seek out isolation at times, due to a social anxiety and an excessive need for “me” time, in order to practice mindfulness..
Science supports laziness
The data found that those with a high IQ got bored less easily, leading them to be less active and spend more time engaged in thought.
Theory of Mind is better developed in smart people
The more developed we are, the more stress we will accumulate. The ability to determine other people's states of mind and attribute reasons to them can, again, be overwhelming. Thinking is good but over-thinking every social situation is damaging to our mental health.