What is the Availability Heuristic and How Does it Relate to Anxiety? - Video Transcript

Hey guys, I'm Kristen, the anxiety therapist and today I'm going to be sharing some information about the availability heuristic. This is a concept that I teach about in my social psychology class and it's basically just a fancy way of referring to a mental shortcut that we take.

So all of us do this, it happens subconsciously and basically we use it to help us make decisions. So um we're inundated with information that our brains can't possibly parse through all of that. And so we take these mental shortcuts in order to arrive at a decision. And the availability heuristic is one of those.

Now where this becomes problematic is that sometimes we sort of overestimate how likely something is to occur, especially if we are prone to anxiety. So let's take flying, for example, that's probably one of the most common fears that people have is flying in an airplane because of that feeling of no control and the fear of the plane crashing.

And this happens because we might hear of a plane crash on the news and so it's more readily available in our minds and therefore we think it's more common when in reality it's actually 65 times more likely that you will get into a car accident if you're driving for the same amount of mileage. This was especially evident after 9-11

Happened there. We saw a big drop in the amount of people that were flying in airplanes when in reality, you know, they were still much more likely to get into a car accident than to have a plane crash. So we see this with other things too.

You know, shark attacks, for example, we might be scared to go swimming because we learned of a shark attack on the news when in reality we're a lot more likely to be struck by lightning. Um, so this is important to note because something I've seen with my clients is that when there's something disturbing, they tend to kind of get fixated on that and go down the rabbit hole of reading new stories about it or scrolling through social media and and sort of gathering as much information as they can about whatever tragedy.

Um, I think most recently the highland park shooting is a good example of that, that a lot of people came away with that feeling like a mass shooting would be much more likely. And while yes, it is more likely as of late. Um, the likelihood of somebody being involved in a mass shooting is still very, very slim and I don't want to minimize the experience that anybody involved in that horrible situation experienced, but I'm just, I'm coming at this from the position of being an anxiety therapist, that, you know, some people will look at that situation and sort of be even more fearful that it will happen to them and sort of overestimate the likelihood that it will happen because of how much news coverage it got, you know, how many people in the community are talking about it, things like that.

So I just want to bring this to your attention so that if there is something that you feel fearful of um you can really kind of take a step back and ask yourself, okay, is this something that is just more available because it's received a lot of news coverage and in reality, you know, what's covered in the news is about that big compared to what happens in the world every day um or is this something that is really a danger to me and that, that I really need to look out for and we need to strike that balance right.

We need to be somewhat cautious and keep ourselves safe and have our wits about us, but we also don't want to overestimate um dangers and live in this state of fear and anxiety and panic. So anyway, I hope that was helpful, definitely follow me on facebook and instagram at cathartic space counseling or you can subscribe to my youtube channel, the anxiety therapist for more content each week, have a great weekend, take care.