Is It Fear You Feel, Or Anxiety?
By: Jay Michaelson
Tags: Economy, Society, Mental Health, Psychology, Coronavirus

This article is not intended to be a rant against the news media or Facebook. As I try to do with all my writing, I just want to suggest the possibility of a different perspective. I also want to present some data that supports my differing perspective.

My hypothesis about the current state of malaise and despair that we see so often around us is this: we have little to fear, but much about which to be anxious.

To repeat: we have little to fear, but much about which to be anxious.

According to the American Psychology Association, fear and anxiety are two distinct mental states, caused by and causing different things:

Fear: n. a basic, intense emotion aroused by the detection of imminent threat, involving an immediate alarm reaction that mobilizes the organism by triggering a set of physiological changes. These include rapid heartbeat, redirection of blood flow away from the periphery toward the gut, tensing of the muscles, and a general mobilization of the organism to take action (see fear response; fight-or-flight response). Fear differs from anxiety in that the former is considered an appropriate short-term response to a present, clearly identifiable threat, whereas the latter is a future-oriented, long-term response focused on a diffuse threat.

To summarize, fear is an immediate alarm response to a real or perceived threat, which causes a distinct action. Anxiety is a long-term emotion which focuses not on a particular immediate threat, but a diffuse threat or threats that may or may not materialize, and which may or may not have a good response.

There are those among us who have good reason to fear the Coronavirus. And there are those with good reason to fear the economic meltdown going on right now. But I would argue that the state of confusion, panic and despair that we see so prevalent around us is not caused by fear, but anxiety.

Fear is a clean emotion. It comes, serves it’s purpose, and departs. Fear is a survival instinct. Using myself as an example, I am afraid of snakes. If I happen across one on a walk in the woods, I will immediately back up, get a safe distance before turning my back, and then run like hell until I feel safe again. That is fear. I do not spend all day everyday wondering if I will encounter a snake, and dreading going out because there might be a snake in my path today. That is anxiety. And that’s what we’re dealing with in the world today.

If anything, I would argue that it would probably be a good thing if more people feared the Coronavirus, because then they would be compelled to comply with social distancing and quarantine guidance. If more people truly feared the economic crisis, they would act to shore up their family’s wellbeing, they would make financial sacrifices before the next panic comes, and they would ensure they had a safety net in place.

But we are not truly afraid of these things, merely anxious. And as a result we do nothing, make no changes, learn no lessons, and so are doomed to repeat the same societal mistakes ad nauseum. Maybe, if we were more afraid and less anxious, we could put systems in place to provide better outcomes in the future.

Unfortunately, in addition to our own human tendency to lethargy and torpor, we also have to contend with a gigantic media establishment that feeds off of anxiety and keeping us trapped in a haze of confusion and inaction. We see evidence of this in the way we have systemically turned away from any kind of journalistic standard in news and prefer to get our information from bloggers, Facebook and Twitter influencers. Somehow, we’ve been conditioned to believe that we will hear the unvarnished truth from our “friends” on the Internet, and never question whether or not these so-called “friends” might not have an even more ingrained agenda than mainstream media does.

We are fed a constant stream of anxiety-fueling hot takes, breaking reports and opinion pieces disguised as news, much of it blatantly contradictory and even downright false, and we wonder why we can’t ever seem to feel any peace or confidence, in ourselves, our neighbors, and our social institutions.

Perhaps, as Franklin Roosevelt famously said, “the only thing we have to fear, is fear itself.” because what’s eating America and the rest of the world from the inside out is not a clean, healthy survival instinct. It is a toxic, cancerous anxiety that is perpetuated by ourselves, that stops us in our tracks and renders us powerless in the face of some pretty fearful things.

To get better, we have to start by being more afraid, of the right things, to be afraid of inaction, to be afraid of a lack of preparation. To be afraid of paralyzing anxiety.

Only then can we turn and begin to make changes to improve our safety and security. For so long as we live in anxiety as a society, we will never be safe.