By Danielle Szewc
In today’s world, misinformation is abundant, and it can be hard to create informed decisions about multiple aspects that affect our daily lives.
Relax, Dammit! A User’s Guide to the Age of Anxiety by Timothy Caulfield is a fresh look into everyday decisions and their ‘associated’ risks. The book walks the reader through a typical series of daily actions, starting with waking up, having a morning cup of coffee, getting to work, and all that follows until going back to sleep and assesses the conventional Western outlook and the risks typically associated with these actions. Caufield cleverly uses science to expose commonly held beliefs about risk assessment related to these activities in an educational and humorous writing style.
Caulfield, Canada’s Research Chair in Health Law and Policy, uses literature reviews and interviews with experts to contrast Western cultural and societal beliefs about the correct decisions to make in daily life and their perceived risk. While in Relax, Dammit!, Caulfield confirms that some cultural and societal beliefs just make life easier, he also concludes that they may not always be the best way to combat risk assessment and anxiety about these actions.
Caulfield debunks multiple pseudoscience myths, such as the health benefits of unpasteurized milk as perpetrated by celebrities in the golden era of social media, and gives the reader tools on how to make daily decisions with less anxiety. He also offers a solid understanding of how multiple health-related articles seen published as clickbait, solely created for higher views and web traffic, are based on small starter studies that are primarily observational. Caufield helps the reader to understand correlation versus causation, which causes these misleading articles to be created in the first place.
While books that may appear to be slightly controversial, as well as scientific in nature, are not everyone’s cup of tea, Timothy Caulfield has elegantly used humour to allow a wider audience to appreciate the subject material. Overall, Relax, Dammit! A User’s Guide to the Age of Anxiety is an easy and fun read to help understand how western cultural norms influence daily decisions and how society weighs the risk-benefit ratio when making decisions in a world of misinformation.
Thank you, Penguin Random House Canada, for the complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review.