Why we sweat the small stuff

BY ERIN K. O'NEILL

My mom frequently says that I was born to worry: She calls me a “stress monkey” every time I call to complain about school.

I think my mother enjoys telling people about my worrying ways. She recently said that one of her friends no longer inquires about my health but simply asks what I am freaking out about this week. It’s usually something to do with the next assignment that I just don’t think I can finish on time and still get a good grade and thus maintain course to graduation, etc.

I’m fairly certain that everyone has something to worry about, be it money, children, health, terrorism, global warming or the sun’s inevitable expansion and engulfment of the Earth.

And no matter what, it’s probably not all that good for you to worry. My constant worry about failing out of graduate school and ruining my life — which currently manifests itself as insomnia, forgetfulness and a pathological immunity to any deadline — is probably shaving years off my life.

And I am not the only one worrying: According to the National Institutes of Health, 40 million Americans over 18 will meet the criteria for an anxiety disorder each year.

So, why do humans worry?  Like most quirks of the brain, it goes back about 1.8 million years ago to the Pleistocene Epoch and our evolutionary ancestors — early members of the genus Homo — who began evolving bigger brains capable of more complex risk assessment and long-term planning. There’s a conflict in the brain’s priorities: automatically maintaining alertness in case of immediate danger versus thoughtfully analyzing risks. In everyday life, humans need both systems of risk assessment to survive. It’s the mundane version of the “fight or flight” response:  Should you run from danger or stand up and fight it?

By this standard, however, I should be much more terrified of, say, an immediate and physical danger such as getting into a fatal car accident than I am of more abstract dangers such as writing a terrible paper for class. But yes, it is the abstract that I worry about, no matter how bad a driver I really am.

Worry is the space between the unknown and the fear of not having the ability to deal or cope with the unknown.

"It is what humans do with simple fear once it reaches the part of their brain called the cerebral cortex. We make fear complex, adding anticipation, memory, imagination and emotion," Edward M. Hallowell wrote in a "Psychology Today" article titled "Fighting Life's 'What Ifs.'"

Thinking intently about fear doesn’t seem like such a good idea, and I am inclined to say that it is not. The wisdom of the ages certainly doesn’t think worry is positive.

“Worry gives a small thing a big shadow,” a Swedish proverb states.

Mark Twain said, “I’ve seen many troubles in my time, only half of which ever came true.”

And Benjamin Franklin said, “Do not anticipate trouble, or worry about what may never happen. Keep in the sunlight.”

“It is what it is,” my mother tells me over the phone.

And after 10 minutes of spewing my worries and insecurities and phobias about graduate school, I usually say, “What? Me? Worried? No way, Mom.”

Erin K. O'Neill is a former assistant director of photography and current page designer for the Missourian. She is also a master's degree candidate at the Missouri School of Journalism.

Published in the Columbia Missourian on Wednesday, November 4, 2009.

A case for alien invasion

BY ERIN K. O'NEILL

If flying saucers arrived on Earth tomorrow, we should all prepare to cheer. Well, unless the little green men are intent upon world domination, then we should triumphantly blow them up with our scrappy ingenuity. And then cheer.

An alien invasion would ultimately cause the world to unite, and after defeating the other race, our little Earth would likely become a peaceful, “Star Trek”-like utopia.  All the hate, the genocide, the wars, would be a page in a violent history of intra-human fighting.

Humans are rather notorious for liking and trusting people they know or have something in common with while disliking and distrusting people who are foreign to them. In evolutionary psychology, it’s called in-group favoritism, and it explains a lot of human behaviors.

Throughout human history, humans have identified with other humans who are like them, creating “in-groups.” In the Pleistocene Epoch 1.8 million years ago, when early members of the genus Homo appeared, an “in-group” was the hunter-gatherer tribe to which a cave person belonged while “out-groups” were rival tribes.

Human-style rivalry is remarkable in one major way: we help other humans in our in-group who are not our kin. Evolutionarily speaking, this means that a human can gain some kind of gene survival advantage through cooperation with other humans. As early humans started developing technology and later, agriculture, this ability to share resources and cooperate led to larger and larger in-groups. A human is still more likely to cooperate with their family, but we have the ability to create broader in-groups of our own definition.

Today, this manifests itself in the creation of nation states, xenophobia and even sporting culture. Humans bond with other humans who are from their hometowns, share a religion or a political leaning. It explains why MU athletics insists upon not capitalizing Kansas — MU is an in-group, while kU is our rival out-group. In one 2003 study, Harvard University researchers found that college students at two rival colleges rapidly constructed their own university fellows as an in-group and the rival university students as an out-group.*

In the Pleistocene Epoch, it simply would have been too risky for an early human to trust another human from a competing tribe, and we hold onto that psychological relic to be wary of the unknown.

So, what has all this got to do with aliens?

If little green men from Mars were to be discovered, or to invade Earth, “Independence Day”-style, humans would very likely become one big in-group. We Earthlings, all 6 billion of us, would have a common enemy, someone else to call “other.” They will look different from us, have a different language, different technology and beliefs.

And not to mention, they will be from an entirely different planet. To wit, Missourians are divided by a baseball team rivalry based on a geographical distance of 250 miles. Being from space, in many ways, is the ultimate unknown to us. All of the factors that can create in-groups and out-groups among the Earth-bound would be inevitably overridden by a race of sentient beings from another planet.

Thus, the majority of the infighting and conflict between nations and states would end on Earth. The threat of extra terrestrial life will take precedence over mere human squabbles. The larger out-group conflict will take priority over all in-group human clashes. After all, the saying “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” holds true.

The nations of Earth could start relating to each other much like states in the U.S. do: peaceful parts of a larger whole. The conflicts between different cultures, religions and races would also be de-prioritized as perceived out-group threats. Basically, humans wouldn’t fight so much. I don’t want to say that the ever-prophesized World Peace would come about, but maybe we’d give the United Nations more power and let go of petty differences that hinder useful diplomacy.

I think alien life is somewhere out there — to presume that Earth is the only planet in the vastness of the universe capable of sustaining life is a display of confounding conceit. When it is found, whether seen through a telescope we send through the galaxies or when it arrives here in flying saucers, humans will have some other intelligent species with which to contend and incentive to make Earth a peaceful place to live for us.

*The 2003 study, titled “Implicit Group Evaluation: Ingroup Preference, Outgroup Preference and the Rapid Creation of Implicit Attitudes,” by Kristin A. Lane, Jason P. Mitchell and Mahzarin R. Banaji of Harvard University can be found by request here.

Erin K. O'Neill is an assistant director of photography for the Missourian and a master's degree candidate at the Missouri School of Journalism.

Published in the Columbia Missourian on Wednesday, July 8, 2009.