Walking the Neurotic Treadmill

In the Western world, serious threats to life and limb have declined dramatically over recent decades. Yet rates of clinical anxiety, PTSD, and suicide have not decreased, and by some measures have increased, especially among youth. I introduce the neurotic treadmill, a homeostatic mechanism for threat detection that may help explain this paradox. Just as the hedonic treadmill suggests acclimation to rewards, the neurotic treadmill suggests acclimation to threat landscapes. It predicts that as environmental threats decrease, humans will become sensitized to smaller threats. This framework complements Haslam’s concept creep: while concepts expand linguistically and culturally, threat detection systems recalibrate cognitively. Together, these processes help explain why anxiety may remain stable, or even increase, in objectively safer environments.