Understand The Relationship Between Fear And Anxiety

It is the worry one feels in the pit of their stomach when faced with a hard decision. It is the sweaty palms and rapid heartbeat right before a big test. It can be easily confused with fear, but anxiety is a slightly more complex feeling. Unease or nervousness are strongly associated with it. While it is an overall unpleasant feeling, anxiety has the ability to keep one safe. To understand what anxiety is one must understand what causes it, and the relationship between anxiety and fear.
Anxiety is a part of everyone’s life and there are an endless amount of things that can cause it. Unlike the high, Anastasia Toufexis describes, when falling in love, anxiety has quite the opposite response in the body. It is an excessive feeling of unease or tension. It is the worry over an undesired outcome. An example of what may cause anxiety would be a persons’ past experiences. If someone had recently been in a car
accident, they would feel anxious about getting behind the wheel again. This is because the brain has made an association with driving and being in danger. The part of the brain that triggers the anxiety is the amygdala, which is in charge of the fight-or-flight response. Even though the person is not in danger when they drive, the association causes the anxiety. Although there are anxiety disorders that can cause high anxiety with no perceived stressor, most cases of anxiety are caused by a stressor such as this.
To understand anxiety one must first understand its connection with fear.
Fear and anxiety are closely related emotions. They both cause faster heart beat and sense of unease. They can both cause each other, however they are not interchangeable. There is a distinguishable difference between the two. Fear, generally, comes as a response to outward stimuli. It is a reaction to a perceived threat. In humans, it is felt when we believe we are in danger. For example, someone is walking home alone at night and are suddenly approached by a stranger. The rush of adrenalin felt from this would be fear. With this sudden threat, the body has the fight-or-flight response. The person must decide if they should run or try and confront the threat. Anxiety, on the other hand, would be felt without the stranger to trigger a response. Anxiety, in this case, is the worry that something might happen while one is walking home alone at night. Someone or something might attack. It is a feeling based on unknown future happenings, whereas fear is based on a present perceived
threat.
Anxiety has its place in the spectrum of emotions. While it is not a good feeling like falling in love, it seems to be a necessary one. The fight-or-flight response, whether it is triggered from an outside stimulus or an inner worry, is there for a reason. Anxiety might just be the body’s way of keeping one out of danger.