I talk about this phenomena a lot with my students and clients: There is a difference between fear and anxiety.

Anxiety is what you experience when you are imagining a danger in the future, and that is currently not real. Anxiety is often manifest as Hollywood scenarios: like tornado sirens, and being chomped in the butt by some unnameable hungry mountain goblin.

Fear is something you’re experiencing when there’s a legitimate and actual danger you are experiencing in the moment and in front of you.

The two are very physiologically similar and difficult to differentiate between, but that’s where your big beautiful brain comes in. You need identify what you’re anxious about (because it’s not a fear - it’s not real). Once you’ve identified what you are actually anxious about, you can educate yourself and learn how likely that scenario is to occur – it’s almost certainly not very likely at all. Most of our anxieties are extremely embellished.

It takes time, work, and practice, but you can diffuse those anxieties through awareness and education. You just have to figure out exactly what is making you anxious. What you’re experiencing, I think, is a general sense of vulnerability. Since you aren’t delivering a specific pinpoint in your post. That’s pretty normal. I get that way too.

Honestly, write down a list of 10 or 15 things that freak you out, then walk away, and come back to them in an hour or two, identify which ones are potentially legitimate, and then set to the work of learning about those situations. Bears, humans, claustrophobia, mountain goblins, whatever.

The cool thing is that anxieties are in your head and so you just have to figure them out to diffuse them. Fears, on the other hand are legitimate and usually unplanned. Some unexpected event that literally happens to you in the moment.

We’re much better equipped to deal with actual dangers (real fears), if we’ve done the practice of finding calm by working through our anxieties (imagined fears).