144 Don’t Let A nxiety Run Your Life
anxious way. Similarly, if you have a fear of germs, you might
believe that all public surfaces— such as door handles, shop-
ping carts, and bathroom sink counters— are dangerous and
should be avoided. Your thoughts related to encountering
these feared surfaces will invariably lead you to feel anxiety.
Heuristics, over time, tend to lead to cognitive bias, or a
type of error in thinking caused by simplified information-
processing strategies. Some psychologists call cognitive
biases “thought habits.” Thought habits arise as automatic,
characteristic ways of thinking about the world and your
relation to it. For example, people are generally biased in
favor of people who hold views that are similar to their own
and who agree with them. It’s why you might tend to have
friends who are similarly minded to you, why you like certain
television news programs over others, or even why you spend
time reading certain websites. Another example of a bias
occurs after you buy a new car or hear a catchy new song.
Unexpectedly, you see that same model of car or hear that
same song every where, because it’s suddenly more relevant
to you. Yet another example of a common bias is that people,
on average, tend to pay more attention to bad news than to
good news. This is because people place a higher importance
on negative news— after all, it’s more adaptive to know
about the dangers around us than it is to know about the
works of a humanitarian. These cognitive biases and many
more are caused by a number of factors, including memo-
ries, attention, learning, and social pressures.
Individuals with anxiety disorders and those who are
more prone to experience anxiety tend to be especially
disposed to both attention and interpretation cognitive
biases (Beard 2011). Attention bias refers to the tendency of
anxious people to pay more attention to threatening stimuli,