What We Think Is Going To Kill Us Vs. What's Actually Going To Kill Us, Visualized

We're all gonna die, and it's probably healthy to spend some time grappling with that fact before we arrive on our deathbeds. But it's probably not healthy to spend a lot of time worrying about how we're going to die — especially because we tend to worry more about unlikely causes of death than about likely causes of death.

This visualization ​is based on data collected by four computational science students at UC San Diego. They looked to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention to find out how people really die, to Google Trends to find out what they worry about dying from and to the Guardian and the New York Times to find out what causes of death the media covers most. Redditor Aaron Penne used their data to build the animation you see above, which really hammers home the extent to which news reports disproportionately make us think we're going to be murdered (especially by terrorists). 

You hereby have our permission to spend the rest of the day worrying about dying, but you're only allowed to worry about dying from heart disease or lower respiratory disease. That ought to even things out a bit.

[via Reddit]