The Destructive Power of Confirmation Bias: Fueling Anxiety with Cherry-Picked Evidence

Hey, everyone, I'm Kristen, the anxiety therapist. Today, I want to share a concept called confirmation bias. I was actually meeting with one of my clients last week and he was having some concerns about his health. I described this concept to him and it really resonated with him and he's like, “Oh, you should make a vlog about that”. So here we are.
Basically, in our increasingly complex and information-driven world, it's really natural for us to see validation for our beliefs and opinions. This desire for confirmation will often extend to some of our deepest fears and anxieties. Confirmation bias is a cognitive bias, meaning that it involves how we think and it influences our perception and decision-making, which can really lead us down a treacherous path and it fuels our anxiety by selectively seeking evidence that affirms these worst-case scenarios.
In this vlog, I just want to explore the insidious nature of confirmation bias and how it can impact our anxiety and mental well-being. First off, just in understanding confirmation bias, refers to the tendency to search for interpret and recall information in a way that confirms our preexisting beliefs or hypotheses. It's sort of this cognitive shortcut that our brain takes to reinforce our existing worldview and seek out evidence that really aligns with our opinions. Then it disregards or downplays any information that might be contradictory in nature. This bias can really affect various aspects of our lives, including how we process information related to our anxieties.
As we know, anxiety is a prevalent concern nowadays that affects millions worldwide. When confirmation bias sort of intertwines with anxiety, it creates this self-reinforcing loop that just perpetuates distress and unease. I'm going to take you through kind of how it unfolds.
First off, we have selective attention. When we're feeling anxious, we tend to fixate on information that supports our fears. We're selectively attending to messages or news or stories or like I mentioned before, sensory experiences or physiological experiences that confirm our anxious beliefs. Another example would be if someone is anxious about flying, they may disproportionately focus on airplane crashes rather than the millions of safe flights that occur on a daily basis.
Then we have interpretation bias. Confirmation bias also affects how we interpret information. We tend to assign more significance to data or events that align with our anxieties and then downplay or dismiss alternative perspectives. This sort of distorted interpretation then reinforces our anxious thoughts and amplifies their impact on our mental well-being.
Finally, we have memory bias. So our memories are very malleable and pretty unreliable, to be honest. They're very much subject to confirmation bias. We're more likely to remember instances that validate our anxieties and sort of reinforce the notion that our fears are based on this consistent and reliable evidence. And then memories that might challenge or contradict our anxieties are often sort of just forgotten or suppressed.

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