What you fear, what you should fear: obsessing about shark attacks, plane crashes and mad cow disease? Stop. Here's what you really ought to worry about

Shape, June, 2004 by Ron Geraci

I'm gripping the armrests while the storm bashes the plane like a pinata, when the guy next to me decides to lean over and do a good deed: "Statistically, you know, you're a thousand times safer up here than you are on any highway," he says, smiling.

Distracted by the primal urge for survival, I resist the impulse to teach him about statistics. I knew he was right, but--as I told him--I would have rather been doing a handstand in the middle of the freeway at rush hour than to stay strapped in that plane for another two minutes. And I meant it.

Illogical? Absolutely. But you probably engage in the same type of thinking about your own health every day. You worry the most about certain dangers that, in truth, are very unlikely to strike. Or at least are far less likely to happen than real threats you blissfully ignore.

Why? "We tend to fear what we can't control and those things that are most readily available in our memory," explains David G. Myers, Ph.D., a social psychologist at Hope College in Holland, Mich., and author of Intuition: Its Powers and Perils (Yale University Press, 2002). For example, most of us assume we're in control when driving a car, so we have little fear of doing things that make an accident much more likely--like tailgating, talking on a cellphone or flipping through our CD case at 65 mph.

We must thank the wonderful world of television too. "The media gives us a lot of images to remember," Myers says. When your brain sees a video of someone getting robbed at an ATM in Dallas, for example, or you witness the dramatic suffering of a shark-attack victim in Kauai, those incidents might as well have happened in your front yard; you may even recall them vividly for years. However, the much likelier risks to your life, such as diabetes, skin cancer, depression or developing a resistance to antibiotics, don't make dramatic television or memories.

Following are five common worries that you're probably stressing over too much, and a few other problems that you'd be smart to give more of your attention to, even if they're not on the evening news.

Worry less about breast cancer

Worry more about "noncelebrity" cancers

"Every woman thinks she's going to get breast cancer, and she probably won't," says Providence, R.I.-based Adelaide Nardone, M.D., medical adviser for the Vagisil Women's Health Center. The mistake is an easy one, though, given all the media attention, with celebs urging women to get mammograms and the reminders of the scary statistics: 40,000 women die a year from breast cancer, and every woman has a 1-in-8 lifetime risk of developing the disease--a stat which factors in the women who find a tiny, treatable lump at age 95.

Finally, we all know someone who, somehow, has been touched by breast cancer.

But here are some other statistics you may not know: Even if you have a family history of breast cancer, your odds of developing the disease by age 39 are only about one in 229, or approximately 0.44 percent. Your chance of developing it by age 25? Only about one in 20,000.

What should young women worry more about? "Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer deaths among women," Nardone says. Projected female deaths from lung cancer in 2004 are 68,500 (yet 22 percent of American women still smoke), while projected female deaths from breast cancer in 2004 are 40,000. A recent study from the journal Lung Cancer found more bad news: Female smokers are twice as likely to get the disease as men are.

Women also underestimate their risk for another common cancer: "Melanoma has taken the lead as the No. 1 cancer in women between 25 and 29 years," says John J. DiGiovanna, M.D., a dermatologist at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Md.

"Women are much more likely to do regular breast self-exams than they are to check their bodies for unusual moles," notes John Romano, M.D., a dermatologist at Weill Medical College of Cornell University at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital in New York City. It's a dubious trade-off: While melanoma kills far fewer women than does breast cancer (2,900 women die of melanoma each year and another 24,000 or so are diagnosed), those deaths are much more preventable. Limiting sun exposure and detecting the cancer early would likely save many of these lives.

Worry less about taking care of others

Worry more about taking care of yourself

"From an early age, women are trained to care for others and not to focus on themselves," says Gabor Mate, M.D., author of When the Body Says No: Understanding the Stress-Disease Connection (John Wiley & Sons, 2003). Many are taught that pleasing others also means suppressing certain emotions to preserve harmony. This may be one reason why women are nearly twice as likely as men to be diagnosed with depression and anxiety disorders.

"Women who suffer from depression and anxiety are more likely to develop autoimmune illnesses, such as chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia," Mate says. This may be due to brain physiology, he adds; new research has found that areas of the brain associated with emotion also seem to be related to those affecting immune-system function. In addition, depressed women are especially vulnerable to heart disease, according to a four-year study of almost 94,000 U.S. women age 50 and above, published in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine; it found that women who were even mildly depressed had a 50 percent increased chance of dying of heart disease within four years.