Don't let worry consume you

KRISTEN HAMLING stock head and shoulds

WHAT are you scared of? Illness, burglary, a person taking your child, global warming, food crisis, running out of antibiotics, refugee crisis, sugar, the world's inequalities or running out of milk?

These were some of the things that were talked about the other day at a party. My friend's father, from the UK, quietly said: "Oh dear, the Worried in Wanganui." We burst into laughter. I realised our concerns were on too great a scale and we should retain some perspective.

We need to balance out our concerns with what is to be celebrated in this world.

Certainly, feeling stressed and worried about certain things can propel us into action, helping to make serious improvements in our lives and the world. But we want to make sure our concerns are realistic and balanced, and our behaviour is based on considered thinking rather than anxiety and stress.

Much of the distorted perception of risk and danger is promulgated in the media. Most news items are negative and concentrate on the catastrophic things that occur. This has resulted in parents not letting their kids go to the park on their own, women not walking home from work for fear of attack, fathers not wanting to cuddle children who have hurt themselves for fear of being deemed a pervert, and children being forced to fundamentally change the way they play.

I'd like to posit to those of us who may be Worried in Wanganui, that you are safer than you think.

Increasingly, we are modifying our behaviour to prevent the worst-case scenario that "could" happen, while creating over-worried, over-protective and risk adverse people. This is a perfect growing field for anxiety.

For instance, of course it is agonising to hear of a child being abducted. Nothing could be worse. However, we have to be realistic. Statistically, the chance of a child being abducted is rare. So to base your behaviour and decision-making around this risk is disproportionate. It would be like never boarding a plane because there have been skyjackings, or never driving because there have been car accidents.

To explain why human beings are so bad at estimating risk, psychologists have identified the "availability heuristic". This is a mental shortcut that relies on immediate examples that come to mind when evaluating a topic or trying to make a decision. Things that spring to mind more easily are believed to be far more common than they are. For instance, if our child wants to go to the park alone, we might ask ourselves, "how safe is that and what are the chances of something bad happening?" As this is a difficult question, which relies on a fair amount of knowledge, we generally ask instead, "how easily can I think of an example of something bad happening?" Chances are you can think of one or two recent examples based on watching international media and you will base your decisions around this.

The availability heuristic probably worked well in prehistoric days when a caveman could think of at least one occasion when a clan member was eaten by a sabre-tooth tiger. Even though it only happened once, to Borg in Cave 2G, it was horrible. Because cavemen lived in much smaller clans, such horrible things would be worth worrying about and avoiding. The 21st century poses a different scenario. Today, if a terrible thing happens to one person in a society of 100 million - or even in a global society of seven billion - we all hear about it, but it doesn't increase the risk of it happening to us by much at all.

So keep things in perspective and balance out the "bad news" stories with some good ones. Also, rather than teaching our kids about all the bad things that can happen and protecting them from that, focus on raising resilient, assertive and confident kids who can deal with the more common challenges they are likely to face. This is probably what will keep us safe the most.

-A registered psychologist with a masters in applied psychology, Wanganui mother-of-two Kristen Hamling is studying for a PhD in positive psychology at Auckland University of Technology.