Anxiety and the Smoke Detector Principal
By Omar Abu-Wishah, MA in Clinical Psychology
March 6, 2025
Have you ever had a smoke detector go off when you were just cooking a meal? You probably have, and you may have been frustrated by how sensitive smoke detectors are. While this can be annoying, it’s a feature, not a bug. It is better to deal with the inconvenience of turning off your smoke detector whenever you cook a steak than it is for your smoke detector to fail to warn you of a real fire! The oversensitivity of the detector creates more false alarms, but ensures that no real fire goes unnoticed.
Anxiety can be understood in a very similar way. Since humans have spent the vast majority of their evolutionary history in dangerous settings, anxiety has evolved to be oversensitive – just like a smoke detector. Think of it this way: if you are living as a hunter gatherer in the ice age, and you hear rustling in the brush nearby, its best to assume that danger could be near. You risk nothing for being overly cautious, but risk your life if you are not cautious enough!
Thankfully, most of us now no longer live in the harsh world of our ancestors. We do however still have the same protection mechanism – anxiety – as they did. The difference is the threats we face are much smaller; we may worry about a social interaction, work or school pressure, or fears of the future. Despite this, the oversensitive of anxiety remains the same. We feel the same emotion as our ice-age ancestor who is nervous about a sabretooth tiger in the brush, but about issues far less pressing.
This isn’t to say our anxieties are not real; they are as real as any other emotion, and their causes are sometimes valid. However, knowing that anxiety is oversensitive, just like a smoke detector, can help us better understand why we may worry so much about even the little things.
Omar Abu-Wishah, MA in Clinical Psychology
I am an intern here at Nexus while pursuing my MA in Clinical Psychology from UCCS. I have received training in multiple types of therapy and strive to individualize my approach to the person or group I am working with. I am therefore open to work with anyone who would like my help! In my view, my job as a therapist boils down to one thing: to assist and enable you to be your best self. This means helping you realize and leverage your strengths, while acknowledging and improving upon your weaknesses. Therapy is an honest collaboration between client and therapist. Without active participation from both, healing will be stifled. While this sounds scary, I will ensure that therapy moves at a pace that you are comfortable with. Overcoming challenges is an essential part of therapy, but it is my job to make sure you can tackle them at a manageable and healthy pace. While I cannot do the work for you, I will do everything I can to walk beside you along the way.
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