What's going to kill you?

Believe it or not, this is the least violent time to be alive in human history. We have relatively few war-torn areas, violent crimes are rarer than they used to be and even sexual crimes are less prevalent.

It may not feel that way though. It feels like we hear about murders and rapes and bombings every day, an unrelenting tide that brings in new atrocities with it each morning, washing them up on our newsfeeds and subreddits.

Why does it feel this way? How can we have such a badly skewed idea of what’s going on if the stats are real?

This is thanks to a thing called the Availability Heuristic.

The Availability Heuristic is a mental shortcut baked into humans that means we reach for the most immediate examples our brains can find when we try to evaluate concepts, methods, topics and decisions. This means that important, recent thoughts we’ve had on a topic tend to be what jump to mind as soon as that topic is brought up. We don’t take a long-term view by default.

So although we live in a statistically less dangerous time, with the incidence of violent crime dropping year on year, we also live in a time where where are saturated by media and bombarded from all angles by news. There may be less incidents, but we’re far more likely to have heard about them.

So if you’ve had a friend involved in a car crash recently, you’re probably going to feel like the roads are a lot less safe. If your brother gets mugged, you’re probably going to take a dim view of how safe it is to walk around your city. If you closely follow the latest bombing or mass-shooting story, you’re going to feel like the world is a dangerous place.

The thing is though, that now you know about this effect and what it’s doing to you, the blinkers are off. You can choose to take a deep breath when you hear about something terrible, and remember, awful though the crime may be, that if you’re reading this blog, chances are good that you live in a safe area, in a safe time.

In fact, the truth is that we’re all much more likely to die of heart disease or cancer than to be run over or shot. People dying in hospital beds from (unfortunately) run of the mill complications of obesity or a lifetime of smoking does not make for sexy news, so we don’t realise how much more common it is than the “glamorous” alternatives.

We don’t get reporters standing in hospital wards telling us the latest death tolls from those mundane-yet-common-killers, just like we don’t get them reporting from Grafton Street telling us how safe we all are. It doesn’t make for gripping news.

Looking after your body with good, healthy food and lots of delicious, nourishing movement is one of the best things you can do if you want to lead a long, happy life. It’s definitely going to do more for your chances of survival than worrying about car crashes or terrorist attacks.

It’s more unlikely than ever that something violent is what will get you. Instead, we live in a time when each of us are our own worst enemy.

But you don’t have to be. Get out and move. Eat well. Everything in moderation, especially stress (perhaps avoid reading so much depressing news?).

If you look after yourself well, chances are good that you’ll be okay, and stay in the game for the long haul.