Mal Fletcher comments

I think we can safely say that on a physical level we are more robust than people were thirty years ago. Medical advances, better nutrition and new technologies have all contributed to higher levels of general health.

Life expectancy and healthy life expectancy (years spent in fairly good health) have increased for both British men and women since 1981. In that time, life expectancy has risen by almost six years for men and just over four years for women. In some other first world nations the jump is even greater.

Whether we've become more psychologically robust is a very different matter.

The Mental Health Foundation says that there are now 800,000 more people in the UK who suffer from anxiety disorders than they were in the early 1990s. Apparently, seven million Brits suffer in this way.

A global psychiatric conference in 2007 declared ours to be the 'age of paranoia'. In the same year, a leading British psychiatrist announced that one in four adults suffer irrational fears of some kind.

In the age of 24/7 news about climate change, terrorism, pandemic diseases and a myriad other threats, fear itself may be the greatest hazard to our future. Media newscasts regularly warn of this 'crisis' or that 'emergency' - words that, according to some studies, were used far less frequently just fifteen years ago.

The hyperbole grows as the media marketplace becomes more crowded and news providers jostle to hold our ever more limited attention.

Many of the supposedly earth-shattering stories we hear about may be nowhere near as dire as we're led to believe, yet we may now be more attuned to threats than we are to facts.

To illustrate, most of us will thankfully never experience an act of terrorism first-hand, yet many of us live with the threat of terrorism as the background music to our lives, impacting important lifestyle choices.

Fear has benefits, but only in an immediate, fight-or-flight capacity. If it is sustained, fear becomes counterproductive, limiting our ability to see creative options and plan strategically, and dangerous to our health.

The level of fear in a community is difficult to measure, but harder still is peoples' self-reliance. It's difficult to prove statistically but I don't think it's a stretch to say that we rely more on external agencies to help us get by than our parents ever did.

Governments, having also contracted the fear virus, continually set up all kinds of new agencies and introduce new laws to 'protect' us - which in public safety areas often means protecting themselves from us, as in lawsuits.

Yet many of these new laws impinge too much on our personal liberties and new agencies often provide only dubious public value for money.

In the end, both often produce disempowerment, further weakening our already fragile sense of resourcefulness. And we let it happen; we even welcome it.