Dr. Nizar Taki is an independent contributor for The FEARLESS Man blog. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in his work belong solely to Dr. Taki and do not necessarily represent those of The FEARLESS Man.
Some things always show up at the same time.
Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. With transformation comes chaos. With chaos, uncertainty tags along. And when uncertainty rears its ugly head, fear is not far behind.
As of this writing, 126,000 Americans have been killed by the COVID-19 pandemic, (489,000 deaths worldwide) and the global landscape has been changed forever.
The fear of physical illness and death is still widespread. Add to this the economic toll of lost jobs and shuttered businesses, as well as the psychological toll of social isolation imposed by the quarantine, and it’s no surprise that it feels like the very fabric of humanity has been permeated by fear, anxiety, and uncertainty.
Currently, our local governments are giving us the green light to resume some semblance of normal life. How can we go out into public and try to act normal when an invisible threat lurks in every handshake and on every countertop? Is it possible to live our lives without fear while also staying safe?
Fear and Safety
As I will demonstrate, our feelings of fear have nothing to do with how safe we are. In the first half of this post, I’ll explain how a phenomenon known as the availability bias causes us to feel a disproportionate amount of fear when the true risk of the disease is much lower than we believe. In the second half of the post, I’ll show how stress and fear actually weaken our immune systems, which paradoxically makes us more likely to get infected.
Ultimately, we need to see through the myth that we need to be afraid and worried to be safe. Adherence to common-sense guidelines and feeling afraid are two separate issues that need not be linked whatsoever.
Is Covid-19 A Death Sentence?
Those who are afraid of contracting COVID aren’t worried about coming down with a bad flu. They’re worried about ending up intubated and on a ventilator in a hospital ICU, or worse – in the morgue. And while it is true that the virus has caused respiratory collapse and death in even young and healthy individuals, we forget that the vast majority of individuals who are infected are asymptomatic or have minimal symptoms.
Most of us already know this on an intellectual level. So why is ruminating about COVID-19 so hard to stop doing? Why do people talk about the virus as if it’s the grim reaper?
The reason is a phenomenon known as availability bias.
Availability Bias
The availability bias is our tendency to think that events that are more easily recalled (more “available” to our memories) are more commonly occurring. Since extreme examples of anything (ie, a COVID-19 patient getting intubated) are easier to remember than less extreme examples (ie, someone who tested positive, but only had mild symptoms), we tend to erroneously view the extreme examples as more common than they really are.
The news media doesn’t help in this regard. Since it’s news outlets’ jobs to get people watching/reading their content, they tend to bias their coverage toward the most extreme and terrifying aspects of our modern-day reality. While this is a good strategy for a news agency trying to get eyeballs on their content (because humans tend to preferentially fixate on what might hurt them so they can avoid it), it tends to create a wildly inaccurate (and rather depressing) portrayal of reality.
Driving a Car: Overcoming the Availability Bias
Here’s an example to help illustrate the availability bias: it would be like constantly worrying about a car accident every time you get into a car, even though you know that they are statistically rare compared to the times that you get from point A to point B safely.
When we use the availability bias to inform our decisions, absurd behavior results. Imagine if you decided never to drive because you were too worried about a car accident.
Or, imagine that you do drive, but are constantly worried that a driver is going to veer over from the opposite lane and crash head-on into your car because you heard of it happening to someone before. Do you think this obsession would make you a better driver? Would you want to fly in an airplane if the pilot was constantly fixated on avoiding a plane crash instead of focusing 100% on their pre-flight checklist?
The problem with using the availability bias to inform our decisions is that we will either a) unnecessarily avoid certain behaviors and activities to try to protect ourselves, thus stifling our potential over inaccurate data, or b) be brave enough to step out into the world despite our fear, but be so fixated on the rare extreme outcome occurring that we actually draw that outcome to us! We go where we’re looking, after all.
So how do we overcome the availability bias? We take the appropriate precautions (wear seatbelts, drive safely), and then temporarily forget the worst-case scenario as we drive so we can get to where we are going. This doesn’t mean that we are pretending the worst-case scenario doesn’t exist. It just means that we understand the fact that worrying about the worst-case scenario will not help us prevent it from occurring. In fact, permeating our minds with scary scenarios actually increases the likelihood that we stumble into the very problem we are trying to avoid!
It’s easy to see how this works with planes, trains, and automobiles, but you might be shocked to learn how this applies to a virus as well.
The Mental Effect On Stress
The fight or flight response protects you against lions and tigers, but not against viruses.
If we allow a worst-case scenario to permeate our minds, we actually increase the chances of it occurring. That’s right, if you cannot stop stressing about avoiding COVID, your chances of getting infected actually go up. How is this possible? I’m not referring to the law of attraction or any other spiritual woo-woo here, but simple biology and physiology.
You see, our bodies respond to stress by activating the fight or flight response. This response evolved when we were hunter-gatherer nomads. During that time period, the sources of stress we dealt with were attacks from predators, enemy tribes, or other immediately life-threatening situations. These were MACRO-scale threats – threats that we could see, fight, run away from, or otherwise deal with on a physical level. The fight or flight response is for things you can SEE, things OUTSIDE of you. It doesn’t work on microscopic invaders or things that exist in your imagination.
If you were to cross paths with a hungry tiger, your physiological state would change dramatically. The adrenal glands perched on top of your kidneys release a surge of stress hormones cortisol and adrenaline into your bloodstream. These hormones tell your body to shunt blood, oxygen, and nutrients towards your muscles, heart, and lungs, because these are the organs that help you fight or flee. Accordingly, your blood pressure, respiratory rate, and heart rate goes up. They also tell your body to shunt energy away from those systems that are not needed to fend off the tiger, like your digestive tract and (important to this conversation) your immune system.
The Immune Response
Your immune system is useless if you are fleeing a tiger attack. But now, notice what happens when you get sick… your body does the exact opposite: it shunts energy away from the fight-or-flight system and towards the rest and digest systems so it can take the battle internally against microscopic invaders. You can think of the fevers, fatigue, and body aches you feel when you get sick as your body’s way of letting you know you need to rest and conserve your strength so that your immune system can do its work.
You wouldn’t bring a knife to a gunfight, would you? Yet that’s exactly what we do when we activate our stress response by thinking about COVID.
This happens because of one important fact:
your body’s stress response occurs in response to what is perceived, not what is actually there.
If I’m walking through the woods and I see a bear, my fight or flight system will kick into high gear immediately. It doesn’t matter if it was actually a large, shaggy dog that I mistook for a bear, or a guy wearing a bear suit. If what I perceive is a bear, then that’s how my body will respond, regardless of what’s actually there.
When we were hunter-gatherers, we didn’t have knowledge of microbes. We couldn’t even imagine them. Thus, if we perceived a threat, it was probably because there really was a threat in the environment we had to escape from.
Unlike our caveman ancestors, we modern humans can focus our imagination and attention on COVID and a million other threats we can’t actually fight or run away from, and we can do this indefinitely.
The Real Damage and Danger of Stressing About the Pandemic
Now, stress hormones don’t cause long-term damage to our bodies if they’re only present for a few hours or days. But when they’re present for weeks and months, even in very small quantities, they wreak havoc on almost all of our organ systems.
When I imagine myself intubated in the hospital even though I’m completely healthy, I’ve used my imagination to create the perception of a threat to my well-being. My body will respond to this threat as if it’s real by releasing small amounts of stress hormone into my bloodstream.
As long as we fixate our mind on things that worry us, we are effectively hooking ourselves up to an IV line that is slowly dripping stress hormones into our bloodstream. This is bad news not just for our immune systems, but our lifespan in general.
All this is to say that, by stressing about COVID, we actually increase our chances of getting it.
The links between our emotional state and immune function are well documented and well understood. Stress causes immune dysregulation, which means it creates an imbalance between the excitatory and inhibitory factors of your immune system. This can lead to an immune deficient state, as discussed above, which means your body can’t mount a strong defence against invaders.
Stressing Might Put You at Higher Risk of a Serious Case
But that’s not the only problem: a poorly orchestrated immune system can also result in the opposite problem: an exaggerated immune response, in which the immune system attacks the body’s own tissues, causing more damage than the virus itself.
The most common reason a young and healthy individual ends up needing to be intubated for respiratory failure after contracting COVID is NOT because the virus is directly destroying their lungs, but because of a phenomenon known as the cytokine storm, which is an exaggerated response of the immune system.
While the association between stress and autoimmune conditions like the cytokine storm has yet to be explored, most physicians will agree that feeling stressed and worried (whether in general or specifically related to COVID) causes some degree of immune dysregulation. And immune dysregulation increases both the chances of getting the virus AND the chances of having the feared complications that can require hospitalization.
This is not to mention the effects that stress has on sleep, cardiovascular health, and the endocrine system that regulates our hormones. For example, if you are losing sleep over stress, you are exposing yourself to the plethora of problems that lack of sleep creates (below is an excellent TED talk about the importance of sleep), effectively giving your immune system a double wallop!
If it’s not clear already – think of it this way: someone sitting in a bubble – completely isolated from COVID – can still considerably shorten their lifespan by focusing on and worrying about coronavirus. We can literally THINK our lives shorter.
Stress Is Separate From Common Sense
Many people have equated worry with safety. The idea is that if you’re not worried about something, you must not be paying attention to it or are careless. It’s worth noting here that when I say “worry” I’m referring to the emotion of worry or fear.
The fact of the matter is, how worried one feels has nothing to do with how safe they really are. One can be in a perfectly safe environment, protected from all possible dangers, and still feel worried. Likewise, one can be navigating a very dangerous and precarious situation while feeling completely calm and in control.
Why is this the case? Simple. Our emotions are reflections of our thinking only, not our outside circumstances. The feeling of worry simply points out that one is thinking worried thoughts, regardless of their current situation. If our minds are calm, still, and open, we can feel calm confidence and security even in a very tense situation.
We need to realize that fear, or the lack thereof, does not need to be connected with how safe we are.
We can be careFREE without being careLESS. We can adhere to every precaution – masks, social distancing, hand hygiene – all without feeling an ounce of fear. We can simply do these things because they make sense, not because we are afraid.
So long as we are being aware and conscious and acting out of common sense, the feelings of fear and worry simply do not add anything to our ability to protect ourselves. In fact, the paradoxical reality we just discussed is that these negative emotions actually hinder our bodies’ abilities to protect themselves.
Those who are high risk should of course adhere to precautions. But even if you do fall into a high-risk category, you still don’t benefit from worrying about the virus.
Life After Lockdown – Being Safe and Emotionally Healthy
To make the most of the post-COVID reality, we must be willing to let go of our fear on our own. The CDC and the government can provide us with facts and guidelines, but it’s OUR job to handle our own fear.
The first step is handling the availability bias. This may require disconnecting from the fear-mongering of news and social media, whichever side of the political arena you are on.
Beyond this, we must see that our thoughts create our emotions, and our emotions create our experience of reality, including how healthy we are overall. So we should not take our thoughts or emotions lightly, or pretend that by being worried we are preventing something catastrophic from happening.
The fact is, COVID is not going to disappear from the face of the earth. It may hang around for a while just like the flu and common cold. We cannot hide away forever, and when we do venture into the world, we must and should adhere to precautions to protect those who are at risk.
But if we really care about our health and the health of those we love, we cannot ignore the true invisible enemy of humanity: fear, which is far more contagious than the coronavirus, and has destroyed many more lives.
