Being Vigilant about Lions
As we already mentioned in the essay on exercise and sleep, the major stress-filled challenges facing us are not always real and immediate present. They are often anticipated or even imagined. They are the lions we produce in our fertile imagination that seem to be either crouching and are prepared to pounce or are already chewing on our leg (or more likely our heart and mind). We have already mentioned in a previous essay that it gets even worse. We don’t try to fight the lion or run away from the lion. Rather we freeze and hope the lion doesn’t see us or simply considers us unworthy of attack (or not very appetizing).
What we have not noted up to this point is that we must remain vigilant while the imagined lion is lurking. If the lion is already harming us, then we can test to see if it is real or not.
• Am I actually being hurt right now by the abuse heaped on me by my boss (remember the old childhood refrain: “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never harm me!!”). Will my boss fire me or reduce my salary or put me on probation – or is this just him blowing off steam?
• What if my adolescent child threatens to leave home after our argument this evening. Will she actually leave and for how long? And what realistically are likely to be negative outcomes from her staying at her friend’s house for several days?
• Yes, I did get a warning from my physician about being overweight. But what are the chances that I will experience a heart attack during the next couple of months. And I can begin some weight-reduction initiatives.
The Behavioral Economy of Lions
There is a new interdisciplinary field called “behavioral economics” (that has generated several Nobel prizes). Researchers in this field have identified what they call “heuristics” (simple, easily-accessible rules and perspectives)—and among these heuristics are several that focus on negative outcomes. We see these heuristics operating when we decide not to fly on an airplane (having read of the crash of a plane), when it is much safer than driving a car. A negative heuristic also operates when we envision what our harassing boss could do, when we imagine the harm that could come to our daughter leaving home, or when we anticipate our heart attack.
If we imagine that the lion is actually attacking us, then we can assess the situation in a realistic manner – and challenge our own negative heuristics. It is when the lion is “lurking” that we are most inclined to experience stress. It is when we have almost lost a job or almost felt ill that we worry most – for we can imagine the negative impact and can most fully employ a negative heuristic without recourse to actually testing out the probability of the negative impact (for it is a possibility rather than an actuality).
