Study: Your Anxiety Was Caused by Choose Your Own Adventure Books
What came first--your anxiety or CYOA books?
Statistics reveal that 30% of all adults have overwhelming anxiety due to a number of frightening events and stressful situations.
Until today, the real culprit behind anxiety was still unknown. However, various studies and research pointed out that while environmental stresses, bad genes, and real-life experiences trigger anxiety, the main root cause of a life of anxiety stems from reading Choose Your Own Adventure books as a child.
Maybe it was the "second-person" narration style that put you in the center of the action, or maybe it was more the stress of making the wrong decision, but whatever the true reason, determining the main character's actions and the plot's outcome screwed you up in such a way that you now overthink every decision in your adult life.
If you grew up in the 80s or 90s, you probably read a few interactive fiction titles from the Bantam series, "Choose Your Own Adventure," originally created by author Edward Packard.
Due to the format of the book, a reader was more likely to make a "bad decision" than good one, creating a level of stress probably not healthy for the intended 10-year-old age demographic.
The original idea for the books came to him innocently enough: the concept came to him while coming up with original stories for his daughters during bedtime. While struggling to invent new ideas for his made up stories each night, Packard would ask his daughters "what happened next?"
Little did he know that his simple idea would sell over 250 million copies and popularize the concept of gamebooks that made the reader the main character and left the outcome of the story subject to their decision-making process.
But if you've ever read one of these novels before, you know that after a few pages you are asked to choose from two or three scenarios, which leads you to even more decisions that might affect the successful outcome of the story. Most have anywhere from 30-40 different unpredictable outcomes, while only a handful decisions are "correct," leading to a happy ending.
Due to the format of the book, a reader was more likely to make a "bad decision" than good one, creating a level of stress probably not healthy for the intended 10-year-old age demographic.
The more incorrect decisions you made, the more anxious you would feel.
Aside from the tension that the novels created and the pressure that the reader felt to make the right call, the novels themselves presented trick endings that would make you question your entire decision making process.
One of the most famous examples of this is in the book "Inside UFO 54-40," where the only successful outcome is achieved by turning to the wrong page by accident.
In another book called "Space and Beyond," a seemingly obvious and entirely moral decision to attempt to save the world from its own self-destruction is undercut by the following outcome: "How do you try to convince people to stop polluting their planet when they have been doing it for so long? Maybe it's a hopeless task. THE END"
What the actual fuck? Children were reading these books as a way to escape from reality and the author was just out here serving up grim truths.
Another outcome of that same book makes the reader believe they have escaped the clutches of evil aliens, only to have the protagonist accidentally put his space cruiser at warp speed and go into a black hole where he disappears into "starry emptiness."
Well that got existentially dark quick.
But perhaps the best example of the root cause of your crippling anxiety stems from your reading of "Trouble on Planet Earth," which centers the realistic conflicts of what ails you right at home.
One conflict involves nefarious CIA double-agents. Another one has terrorists stealing the world's oil supply. Another has the earth losing its precious natural resources. How about the one where nuclear waste eats through the earth's core?
Jesus Christ, Packard! We were innocent children looking for a pleasure read! Now not only do you have me second-guessing my decision-making skills, but you have me thinking about all the ways that I can accidentally destroy the planet.
If I knew that the only final outcome of CYOA would be GAD (generalized anxiety disorder), I would have stuck to the Hardy Boys or Magic Tree House.