We’re Worried About The Wrong Things

“Don't listen to "experts" predicting what might happen. They have no idea what's going to happen.”

Jeffrey Gittomar

Author, “The Little Red Book of Sales” among others

If you are a parent, what do you worry most about? According to a Mayo clinic survey that was mentioned in a story in the New York Times on September 18^th, 2010, parents are most worried about, kidnapping, school snipers, terrorists, dangerous strangers and drugs.

The story was titled, “Keeping Kids Safe From the Wrong Dangers” and, as you can infer from the title, parent’s worries bear little relationship to reality. According to the Centers for Disease Control, the five things most likely to cause injury to children up to age 18 are car accidents, homicide, child abuse, suicide and drowning.

In fact, "The least safe thing you can do for your child it to drive them somewhere" according to Lenore Skenazy, author of "Free Range Kids."

British writer Warwick Cairns, author of "How To Live Dangerously" calculates that "If you wanted to guarantee that your child would be snatched off the street, he or she would have to stand outside alone for 750,000 hours."

In reality, homicide is down, kidnapping is down, traffic deaths are down. So why do we so often worry about the wrong things?

The answer lies in our brains and in what’s called our “reticulating activating system” (RAS) which basically determines what we will focus on. When we experience emotion (hearing of a terrorist attack, reading about home foreclosures or the state of the economy), our RAS goes into high alert and has us watching out for potential dangers. So when we read a newspaper or watch the news on television, we become convinced that we need to be fearful for our safety. Colloquially, we understand this when we say, “What you see is what you’ll get.”

So how fearful do we need to be? Not very. Our perception of fear doesn’t match reality. What we see on television or read in our newspapers is very unlikely to happen to us. Yet we think it will and it keeps us in a state of high arousal. Politicians, advertisers and the media know this and use it to influence our behavior.

So relax. What you see is not likely to be what you get.