It seems like salmonella is everywhere these days, making a lot of people equate eating a handful of nuts with playing a game of Russian roulette. But if you look at statistics, you realize you have just as much to fear from a cold winter’s day:

Which means all those nut products you emptied out of the cabinets “just to be safe” are just as dangerous as walking out to the trash in bare feet and a t-shirt to throw them away.

It’s clear that worry served us well in our hunter-gatherer days when that rustle in the bushes really might have been something deadly, but what we seem to have now is the reaction without the rustle — we worry there might be a rustle and if there is, it might be something that could hurt us.

The problem is that “what it might be” is usually wrong — as anyone who’s ever googled a health symptom and then rushed into the emergency room knows:

YOU: So… how long do I have?
DOCTOR: To live?
YOU: Yes.
DOCTOR: I have no idea.
YOU: But I just read this particular flesh-eating virus is usually fatal within 72 hours!
DOCTOR: It is.
YOU: And?
DOCTOR: You have poison oak.
YOU: Oh.

Somewhere along the line we seem to have lost our perspective on worry. Which probably explains why more people are afraid of being attacked by sharks — which kill an average of 2 people per year in the U.S. — than they are of equally strange, but much more likely causes of death like elevators and escalators, lightening, bees, dogs and even Bambi:

In our defense, part of the problem is that we’re constantly reminded of the many things we have to worry about, with dozens of freaky possibilities brought to our attention every day by a 24/7 news cycle that loves to spotlight the odd and the unusual (without mentioning it’s also “the highly unlikely”).

Leaving us in a position of rushing off to the ER in a panic because we’re worried we might be one of the few hundred people killed each decade by the deadly whatever the Evening News just warned us about, when what we should be worried about is being one of the few hundred people killed each day by medical errors.

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