The guide

Are you afraid of the right things?

By GyroscopeUpdated November 15, 202623 sources

Mostly not. Over a lifetime, an American’s odds of being killed by a shark are about 1 in 4.3 million, and 28% of Americans are afraid of sharks. The odds of dying in a fall are 1 in 89, and only 16% are afraid of falling. Heart disease, at 1 in 6, doesn’t even make the fear list.

Sharks, plane crashes and terrorism are vivid, sudden and in the news, so they feel common. Heart disease, cancer and falls are slow, private and ordinary, so they feel like someone else’s problem. Our brains judge risk by how easily an example comes to mind, and the news hands us the rare ones.

What are the real odds?

Here’s the whole ladder. Each mark on the scale is ten times less likely than the one before, and a shark is about 700,000 times less likely than heart disease.

A picture from daily life

Think of a smoke alarm that shrieks every time you make toast and stays quiet while a wire smolders behind the wall. It’s loud, and it’s pointed at the wrong thing. Fear works like that alarm, tuned by the news and by how dramatic a death would be, not by how likely it is.

Why are we afraid of the wrong things?

Partly because of what we see. Researchers compared what Americans died of in 2016 with what the New York Times and the Guardian wrote about and what people searched for on Google. Heart disease was 30.2% of the deaths among the causes they counted and 2.5% of the New York Times coverage. Terrorism was under 0.01% of the deaths and 35.6% of the coverage. Homicide was 0.9% of the deaths and 22.8% of the coverage.

The pattern held when Our World in Data repeated it with 2023 deaths and three outlets. Heart disease and cancer caused 56% of the deaths and got 7% of the coverage, and terrorism, which killed 16 people in the US that year, got over 18,000 times its share. News is about what’s new, and a heart attack in a hospital bed isn’t news.

How likely is a shark attack?

Vanishingly unlikely. In 2025 there were 65 unprovoked shark bites in the whole world, 25 of them in the US, and 9 unprovoked deaths worldwide. One death was in the US, in California. From 1959 to 2010, sharks killed 26 people in the US coastal states, about one every two years, while lightning killed 1,970 people in the same states.

The Florida Museum, which keeps the world’s shark attack records, puts an American’s lifetime odds of dying from a shark at about 1 in 4.3 million. A bee, wasp or hornet is about 100 times likelier, and a dog about 130 times.

Is flying safe?

It’s the safest way to travel there is. Before January 2025, US airlines had gone 16 years without a crash, and two passengers had died in that time out of about 14 trillion passenger miles. Then on January 29, 2025, an airliner and an Army helicopter collided over the Potomac River near Washington, DC, and 67 people died. MIT’s Arnold Barnett found that from 2018 to 2022, the US and other countries in the safest group had about 1 death for every 80 million passenger boardings.

Airline passenger deaths were too few in 2024 for the National Safety Council to work out odds at all. The drive to the airport is the risky part, at about 1 in 101 over a lifetime for a car crash. Even so, 19% of Americans told the 2026 fear survey they were afraid of flying.

How likely is a terrorist attack?

In the US, very unlikely. Foreign-born terrorists killed 3,046 people on US soil from 1975 to 2024, most of them on September 11, 2001. That works out to about a 1 in 4.6 million chance a year of being killed in such an attack, and an ordinary homicide was about 330 times likelier. Still, 47% of Americans said they were afraid of a terrorist attack in 2026, and in August 2026, 37% told Gallup they were worried that they or someone in their family would become a victim.

The fear has a cost of its own. After 9/11, many Americans drove instead of flying, and the psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer estimated that about 1,500 more people died on the roads in the year after the attacks as a result.

What about lightning?

It kills about 20 Americans a year, the average from 2016 to 2025. The National Weather Service puts the odds of being struck at some point in an 80-year life, injured or killed, at about 1 in 15,300. The National Weather Service’s rule is to go indoors when thunder roars.

What should you worry about instead?

The ones at the top of the ladder, and most of them respond to things you can do.

• Heart disease and stroke, 1 in 6 and 1 in 26. Blood pressure and fitness move them most. bloodpressure.guide has the week of home readings that tells you where you stand, and what adds the most years has the rest.
• Cancer, 1 in 7. Not smoking is the biggest single thing, then screening at the ages your doctor recommends. What quitting gives back.
• Falls, 1 in 89. Strong legs and good balance. People aged 51 to 75 who couldn’t stand on one leg for 10 seconds had an 84% higher risk of dying over the next 7 years. Try the floor test, and strength.guide has how to train for it.
• Car crashes, 1 in 101. A seat belt cuts the risk of dying by 45% in the front seat of a car and 60% in a light truck, and nearly half of the people killed in passenger vehicles in 2023 weren’t wearing one, where that was known.
• Accidental opioid overdose, 1 in 84. Accidental poisoning, which includes drug overdoses, has been the biggest kind of injury death in the US since 2011. If you’re worried about your own drinking or drug use, or someone else’s, you can call or text 988 any time.
• Fire, 1 in 1,365. Nearly three in five US home fire deaths happened in homes with no smoke alarm or one that didn’t work, and the death rate was about 60% lower with working alarms.

Isn’t some fear useful?

Your turn

See your own estimate, with the habit costing you the most years, or take the two-minute quiz.