BRIAN KNUTSON
Associate professor of psychology & neuroscience, Stanford University
I worry about worry. Specifically, is our worry aimed at the right targets? The adaptive value of worry is that it helps us avoid death without having to experience it first. But worry can save us only when directed at actual threats and only by eliciting action (avoidance). Although worry seems to be caused by external factors, it isn’t. The neural worry engine is always on, looking for its next target, like Freud’s free-floating anxiety.
The ancestral environment probably tuned our worry engines, since individual differences in levels of worry show significant heritability (around 50 percent) and are normally distributed (most people experience moderate rather than minimal or excessive worry). This bell-shaped distribution implies that over generations those who worried too little died (or were eaten), whereas those who worried too much failed to live (or reproduce). Thus our forebears’ menu of environmental threats likely selected an optimal level of worry. Less appreciated is the notion that the ancestral environment selected not only the level but also the targets of worry. Consider common targets of phobias, such as public judgment, snakes, spiders, heights. Unless you live in the jungles of New Guinea, these are probably not the existential threats worthy of your worry engine. Leading causes of death in the United States typically are more “boring” (heart disease, cancer, stroke, accidents), encouraged by more proximal causes (smoking, alcohol consumption, poor diet, lack of exercise, cars, firearms). This “worry gap” between imagined and actual threats suggests that our worry is often directed at the wrong targets.
My metaworry, or worry about worry, is that actual threats are changing much more rapidly than they have in the ancestral past, which could widen the worry gap. Humans have created much of this environment with our mechanisms, computers, and algorithms that induce rapid, disruptive, and even global change. Financial and environmental examples spring to mind—witness crashes of global finance bubbles and the rise in global temperature over the past decade. Not only are these changes rapid with respect to an evolutionary time frame but they plausibly result from human causes. I worry that our worry engines will not retune their direction to focus on these rapidly changing threats fast enough to take preventive action.
We could try closing the widening worry gap with data. If we could calculate the relative risk of death by snakes, spiders, cars, and guns, we could compare the discrepancy between what we worry about (e.g., spiders) and what statistically causes more deaths (e.g., cars). Then we could try to swap our lower-ranked worry with a higher-ranked worry. We could even sketch the outlines of software that facilitates a better reallocation of worry. (I’m looking at you, mobile-application developers.) If we’re going to worry about something, it might as well actually threaten our existence.
Another option for closing the worry gap involves policy change. Governments undoubtedly collect valuable data on the relative potency of various threats so as to direct their limited resources toward reducing the most pressing dangers. But information alone is not enough; it must motivate behavioral change. Thus, laws (with enforceable sanctions) are sometimes needed to transform this information into action. Unfortunately, in the case of global threats, governments must coordinate their laws. This is not impossible; it has happened in the past, when governments came together to ban chlorofluorocarbons in order to stop atmospheric-ozone depletion. It may happen in the future with respect to carbon sequestration and global climate change. But it requires a massively coordinated and continued effort.
I’m advocating metaworry rather than hyperworry. Hyperworry feeds on itself: Escalating worrying about worrying could fuel a positive-feedback loop, ending in a fearful freeze. Since the brain has limited energy, we should probably view worry as a resource to be conserved and efficiently allocated. Beyond increasing the worry level, metaworry implies redirecting worry based on information. Retuning our ancient worry engines may be difficult, but not impossible. Consider laws requiring the use of seatbelts while driving. What I find miraculous is not that these laws have become mandatory in most U.S. states, nor even that they reduce fatalities as predicted, but rather that the laws now grab me at a visceral level. Twenty-five years ago, I would never have thought twice about driving without a seatbelt. Now, when I can’t buckle my seatbelt I feel uneasy and tense. In a word, I worry—and seek to close the gap.