Neurotic

OCEAN:

Openness
Conscientiousness
Extraversion
Agreeableness
Neuroticism

How do you classify people by the way they tend to behave? This is the question the Big Five personality traits framework attempts to answer.

Psychologists coalesced around a helpful acronym: OCEAN, where O stands for Openness, C is for Conscientiousness, E is for Extraversion, A for Agreeableness, and N is for Neuroticism.

I’ve tried to armchair-psychoanalyze myself through the lens of each of these traits, asking myself how OCEAN I really am.

I’ve made it to the N. Er, to the end.

N is for Neuroticism.

Neuroticism sounds all negative, but it’s meant to be a spectrum like the OCEA stuff that precedes it, like how the E stands for extraversion, but it’s all about where you land on the introversion/extraversion slider.

In psychology’s Big Five framework, neuroticism measures emotional stability. How much does anxiety or stress affect the way you operate on a daily basis? How acutely do you feel negative emotions?

While EQ (emotional intelligence) is all about how well you can manage your negative emotions and go about your business anyway, neuroticism is how intensely you feel those things in the first place.

My own EQ has only begun growing and compounding in the last couple of decades, but it nevertheless does a serviceable job of protecting me from my worst impulses most of the time. Still, the question of how neurotic I am is often answered by my most obnoxious behavior—usually when I feel a lot of negative pressure.

I can’t say that I feel negative emotions more acutely than most, but I can say for sure that I feel them acutely. There are times when it becomes a true challenge to do things I know are wise or reasonable, and those are almost always the times when the neuroticism inside me gets in the way of a good decision.

That same paralyzing social pressure I felt on my first day of middle school is still here, but it has morphed into different types of anxiety and unease surrounding a different set of things.

Grownup stuff might mean a tough financial decision or an intense conflict I need to help resolve. My central nervous system will certainly be screaming at me the entire time while I apparently navigate with a fairly cool head (except when I don’t).

Roughly 20 years ago, US Grappling ran a truly significant early event for us, where we ended up at VCU’s Siegel Center. This was a huge moment for a very young company, and I will only say that I slept about 20 minutes the night before the event.

Panic attacks aren’t common, but they aren’t totally nonexistent, either. And there are times when my behavior changes for a few days when I’m dealing with sadness or anxiety. Still, overall I know I’m lucky to only be as neurotic as I am!