anxiety

Our brains didn’t evolve to make us happy; they evolved to keep us alive only long enough to reproduce. That fact explains a lot about anxiety, which is a heightened sensitivity to perceived threats (which may or may not be real) in one’s environment.

Related is negativity bias (also called risk-aversion bias), a feature of human psychology which causes us to pay more attention to adverse events than beneficial ones. Media companies in competition with each other for our attention exploit negativity bias by disproportionately showing us negative media because that’s what gets the most attention and so makes them the most money, leaving in their wake rising levels of anxiety and depression (which even feeds back into anxiety-mongering media about rising anxiety!)

That said, of course there are many real threats out there, so we must be wary of oppressors, exploiters, and their apologists who try to deflect accurate criticism of their wrongdoing as simply a manifestation of negativity bias.

As noted in Lost Connections, anxiety often presents alongside depression, both of which are at least in part psychological responses to one’s environment.