You are 5 times less likely to EVER feel fear after reading this.

I have been reading a really interesting book called 'Risk' by Dan Gardner. He looks at fear and how it affects our reactions and our memories. It examines how much we are driven by fear and evidently it is quite a lot.

In business and in life it is easy to react to scaremongering that tells you all kinds of facts and figures about the economy and the state of business in general. How often do we read that businesses are failing and things are generally all going wrong? That the end of the world is nigh? That we are all going to die from a terrible new disease? A ridiculous amount of the time. Does this mean though that it is really happening? What can we do to stop ourselves acting out of fear?

The book offers some fantastic insights into the way that our mind works and how we are fooled into believing things simply because our brains are wired to respond in a certain way.

For example: 

Which seems scarier?

• You have a 1 in 100 chance of getting Cancer before the age of 50?

• You have a 1% chance of getting Cancer before the age of 50?

Apart from the fact that I just made that up, I'm betting that you found the first statistic more worrying. Of course the truth is that they both say exactly the same thing. A 1% chance appears to be minuscule, you have a 99% chance of NOT getting it. Looking at the first assertion though, you suddenly equate that with real people, do you know 100 people? You probably do, which means one of those people will get it before the age of 50 and that could be you.

Another interesting fact is that although I told you I had made those figures up, part of your brain will recall these figures and start accepting it as a possible truth.

Here is another little challenge:

Was Micheal Jackson over the age of 15 when he died? Wait, that's a bit stupid...ok...How old was Micheal Jackson when he died?

For those of you who didn't google it or who didn't automatically know the answer - you will have been heavily influenced by the fact that I mentioned the number 15, you will have answered  lower in age than if I had first asked if he was over the age of 60 when he died. Even though I said it was stupid to say 15, your brain  will have been influenced as it made a best guess. Astonishing isn't it?!!

This happens when we go into shops - people buy more if there is a sign saying 'purchases limited to 10' and they will buy more than they expected because their brain is thinking '10' instead of say '2'. The number can be completely arbitrary and irrelevant and you will still link with it in some influential way.

So you can see how statistics in the papers and on the news can make us wary and frightened.

50,000 pedophiles are online at any one time, did you know that? 50,000 of them! Someone official said that so it must be true. Actually the truth is that we have no idea how many are online at any one time. This is a real life example of figures gone mad. Lots of different sources quoted this very specific number around the world. It was on the news, in the papers, online etc but the number was never credited to a source. When the original source was finally traced it turned out that it was a comment from someone who took a guess. It may be higher than the actual reality, it may be lower - the fact is, we don't know. It was a guess, a guess that was quoted and re-quoted in so many different places that it became fact. It bred fear, it made people afraid and the fear grew and grew.

Look at what happened with the millennium bug - there were whole news programmes dedicated to following the disaster and nothing happened even though lots of people of influence believed that it would.

Learning how fear works allows you to know that it is a useful, but limited emotion. It holds you where you are and doesn't allow you to move forward or to take risks. Some risks are very real - these are often the ones that we ignore because they happened a long time ago and the most time passes since the last time a risk didn't pay off the more we forget and assume it is safe. Take for example the MMR vaccine. Many many parents (myself included for a while) didn't get the MMR jab because we were told how dangerous it could potentially be in a small number of cases. What we forgot, because it had been so long since anyone died from Mumps or Measles, was how much more of a risk these diseases were compared to the small risk of a link to Autism. As a result the logic got twisted as a result of fear mongering and Measles again became a real risk and even resulted in deaths. The Autism scare was eventually shown to be exactly that - a scare, not a reality.

So...fear governs so much of our lives, maybe it is time we stood back and checked the facts, weighed up the logic and break away from the heavy and often inaccurate influences of the media and make our own minds up? What do you think?

Love Nova xxx