When things scare us
There are loads of things that scared us as kids that seem to be timeless childhood fears, things that generations past and future have been and will be afraid of too. Some of these are just childhood fears that we all grow out of, while other fears may stay with us into adulthood.
What’s really more likely to get us, Ebola or the flue? Max Fisher has an article at Vox that simply points out some facts, such as the fact that the flue kills thousands of Americans every year. In 2004, a particularly bad year, 48,000 Americans died of the flu. We’ve had one only a couple of deaths from Ebola and the nation is freaking out, but how many of those freaking out about Ebola have bothered with a flu shot?
In fact, at the moment we are in greater danger of being crushed to death by our own furniture than dying of Ebola. About 30 Americans die every year when a bookcase or other heavy furniture tips over on them, Fisher states. About 40,000 people suffer serious injuries from their own furniture every year. This is not to say Ebola should be ignored, but it shouldn’t be that hard to contain here in the U.S.A given the quality of hospital management. But we know it is spreading and people are scared for good reason.
So how do we handle fear when it concerns Ebola, cancer, or other deadly things that can end life as we know it?
David Kaplan of the American Counseling Association said last week, “People are feeling out of control. They had no control about whether Ebola comes to the United States.” Kaplan said, there’s a cultural imperative to gain and maintain control over one’s own health and safety – an imperative that something like Ebola confounds. “We always like to feel in control of what we do, he said. “That’s why people are often much more afraid of flying than of driving, even though it is much safer.”
Humans have a long history of overreacting like this, often to threats that turn out to be false. When the brain comes into contact with a perceived threat, there are generally one of three outcomes. If the threat is real, the person reacts to the threat properly. It’s called a “hit.” If it is a genuine fear and a person doesn’t react to it, it’s a miss. If a person acts and it’s not, it’s a false alarm,” said Shmuel Lissek, founder of the Angst Lab at the University of Minnesota, where he studies the human brain’s responses to fear.
As it turns out, our brains may have evolved to avoid “misses.” Lissek said, “In early human history the cost of a miss…of not taking it seriously, could potentially be lethal.” But the cost of a false alarm is much lower. The simple version of this idea? It is better to be safe than sorry.
Some people have trouble inhibiting this fear response, even when the logic part of the brain tells them that the threat isn’t real. ”Somebody might rationally be 95 percent sure that they aren’t going to get Ebola, but there is a 5 percent chance they could, so Lissek said “they focus on the 5 percent and say “what if?”
Being over-trained with things helps in the face of stress and having concrete things that one can do also helps them face stress. An example of this is military drills in soldiers emergency responses. It removes mystery and increases solutions to problems.
Ebola will end someday, just as smallpox and other diseases have. But there will always be another “something” and there will always be our fear. The important thing is to not over react and to maintain calm while solutions are being sought and implemented.
