It would be one thing if a tiger were chasing my daughter. Then you could forgive me the whole adrenaline-fueled fight-or-flight feeling. Right now, though, all that's threatening my 9-year-old girl is the grossness of a gas-station bathroom. I watch her fingers graze every surface--I can practically see the flesh-eating bacteria poised to leap onto her hand--and my heart pounds.
I worried before I had kids, but my concerns had an everyday quality ("Dodgy neighborhood--hope nobody steals the car") rather than the apocalyptic, death-and-mayhem catalogue of possibilities that arrives daily in my mental inbox now. It's not just me, I know. I put a query out on Facebook to my friends--What kind of stuff have you guys worried about lately?--and I am sucked under a tidal wave of anxiety (including, yes, anxieties about tidal waves). At least 50 people, most of them moms, message me with worries that include falling out the window, falling from the Irish Cliffs of Moher, collapsing bridges, and that the babysitter had poisoned the pumped breast milk. Not all of our fears are unfounded, of course: As Hurricane Sandy confirmed, scary stuff happens. But it's no stretch to say that mothers, more than anyone else, tend to take real-world fears and supersize them. Louann Brizendine, M.D., a professor of clinical psychiatry and the author of The Female Brain, says that according to studies, anxiety is four times more common in women than men, and "when you have kids, you can get pushed over the cliff once that anxious mommy-brain kicks in." We should rename them the Cliffs of Mother.
What is it about being a mom that makes you assume the worst and Google fatal rash? Neuroscientist Craig H. Kinsley, Ph.D., points to evolution. "Given the choice between slack, inattentive parenting or hyper-vigilance, hyper-vigilance is most likely to result in survival," he says. Brizendine agrees: "All of the females alive today are the offspring of the great-great-grandmothers who were best at keeping their children alive." The cortex of the brain--the thinking part--has actually been shown to expand during pregnancy, and Brizendine likens the resulting "hyper-vigilance of your frontal lobe" to a baby-tracking GPS system. She explains that human babies are extra helpless, and we tend to have only one baby at a time, so we're hardwired to protect that child--in contrast with the breeding strategy of, say, reptiles. I picture myself a few species back in the evolutionary chain, squeezing out a gazillion eggs and slithering away with a clear conscience. Oh, but I would have missed all those lizardy little baby smiles...
"Look, vigilance pays off," Kinsley says. "But the cost is that you're more aware of all sorts of threats, real or otherwise." As Kinsley's research partner, neuroscientist Kelly Lambert, Ph.D., explains it, humans get into trouble when we generate worry beyond immediate threats, imagining everything from losing our jobs to perishing in the Mayan apocalypse. "The lab rats we study are in the moment--when the threat is gone, they're not stressed anymore. But our frontal cortex has the ability to imagine things happening, and that's unique to humans."
We think not only about the disaster but also how we might avoid it, as if we could. "Wanting to be able to control a situation feeds the tendency to worry," says psychologist Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, Ph.D. "You expect the worst as a defense; you don't want to be caught unprepared." For me, this involves a strange idea (a superstition is what I think it's technically called) that if I don't worry enough, something bad will happen. Needless to say, this can interrupt my happiest moments. "The feeling that everything's okay, that peaceful point, is hard to stay in," Brizendine explains. "Your brain is always scanning the environment, needing to protect your helpless infants--even if they're 19 years old, like mine is," she says, laughing, then admits, "I'm always waiting for that phone call about my son."
Of course, if you're like me, you remember your own childhood--rattling around the back of the station wagon, swallowing unminced hot dogs--and wonder why we seem to worry so much more than our mothers did. For one, our worries are stoked in ways that our moms' were not, because, well, there's lots of money to be made from them. (Skim the One Step Ahead catalogue, for example, and unless your outlet covers have covers of their own, you will likely feel more than a step behind.) Also, today's media saturate us in constant catastrophe--Kinsley describes it as "totally fear-based: This is going to kill you, this is going to hurt you." In a study conducted by Montreal's Centre for Studies on Human Stress, women who had read violent or disturbing news articles just before experiencing a stressful situation responded with soaring levels of anxiety.