The Difference Between Anxiety and Fear
What's a real threat and what's amorphous?
On Tuesday, January 7, the day the Pacific Palisades and Altadena largely burnt down, I walked to the top of my driveway with my husband and oldest son. While we were not yet in a mandatory evacuation zone, we could see a wall of flames all along Sullivan Canyon—a ridge that’s about a mile from our house—an inferno put into even greater relief by the setting sun. I felt flooded by fear. Before I was even conscious of what was happening, I had run back down the driveway. We had already packed earlier in the day—ten minutes later, we were out the door.
The etymology of fear comes from danger. It suggests there is a discernible threat—in this case, nature-naturing—a threat that is completely and utterly out of one’s control. For me, the decision to flee was instinctual. (The other typical fear responses, as I’m sure you know, are flight, freeze, and fawn.) My husband would have liked to stay to fight, though after lingering for another hour or two to hose down our roof and catch our third, terrified cat, he followed us down the hill.
There’s something about this automatic, biological programming that brings a lot of relief: We are conditioned to take action in the face of threat, action that is predictable based on our physiological tuning. In a sense, our body knows what to do as our minds bail—my fear felt entirely somatic, an automatic response to keep me and my children safe. Leave, go, now. Move.
Last summer, I wrote a newsletter about overfunctioning and underfunctioning, which is a fantastic Harriet Lerner frame. I’m an overfunctioner, which means that in times of crisis, I put a cork on emotional overwhelm and do what needs to be done, leaving all the feeling and processing until later. If I ever get to it. This is definitely how I’ve operated through the fires—stuffing and choking down my fear—and so I was not all that surprised to feel my anxiety disorder (chronic hyperventilation) poke its head out at the end of last week. It goes something like this: If you don’t deal with me, I will deal with you. I suddenly found myself unable to take full, deep breaths—and I’ve been yawning compulsively. (I’ve written about my breathing disorder here: “Catching Our Breath.”) The timing didn’t seem coincidental, either: The fires may now be 100% out, but Trump and his best friend Elon Musk are anything but remotely contained. (I wrote about Trump as a forest fire a couple of weeks ago: “Holding a Positive Vision for the Future.”)
The etymology of anxiety is Angere (Latin), or to choke. Yep, anxiety is a type of strangulation, a slow asphyxiation. To me at least, it feels quite distinct from fear: It’s amorphous—loosely grounded in the future, or in fantasy. Anxiety is responding to the stories we make up about what might happen, even when we aren’t conscious of what those stories may be. Fear feels more sourced in fact. (For more on Fact vs. Story, there’s this newsletter and this podcast, “Is Fear Driving You?”) Typically, I don’t know what I’m anxious about…it’s never concrete, it’s never in response to a specific event. Whatever it is that’s threatening and taking away my breath feels dispersed, intangible, unrealized. It would be so much easier to contend with anxiety if you only knew what it was about. We’re not talking about a forest fire from which to flee, we’re talking about the feeling that something is just not quite right…and you don’t know what do about it (if anything).
I went to see my friend Dan Bienenfeld yesterday, an incredible healer who does Hellerwork and structural integration on the body—I wrote about him a bit here. Dan lost his home in the Palisades fire and he made an Instagram video shortly after where he talked about how the body is designed to go into a protective mode during threat—and most of us vacate the premises. Through simple presencing—feeling into your body from the inside out—you can move back in. It starts with slow deep breaths. It requires feeling your feet on the earth.
Dan is going to do a Q&A with me in the next few weeks about fear and anger specifically, and how the body tries to deal with this type of stimulation, as I think many of us are trying to get generalized anxiety—and localized fear—out of ourselves. He’s got tips. I have enough somatic awareness at this point—in part, from doing therapeutic MDMA—to recognize that my body prefers to store this type of stimulation, or anything it doesn’t know what to do with, often in my hips. I wrote about this a bit in On Our Best Behavior, but during my first session with my therapist for that particular journey, which I did as a bit of a lark back in 2019 so I could talk about the experience for a TV show we were making, I recovered the memory of a childhood trauma that I had stuffed and repressed. (It was definitely a “lark” no more, though I’m very grateful I did it.) As I relived this childhood experience during the first eight-hour session, my body started discharging stuck energy. For 10, 12 hours—to the point where I needed to be sedated later that night so I could sleep—my body was in an extended somatic dance that was completely out of my control. It went like this: My hips would rattle back and forth. Next, my shoulders would shake. Then my body would do a demented version of an S, over and over again. Rinse and repeat. If you asked me to demonstrate this for you at will, I couldn’t do it. My body was on auto-pilot, wringing itself out. In the intervening years, I’ve occasionally slipped into this again—sometimes in my sleep, sometimes during intense meditations or chaotic breathwork. Unfortunately, I can’t beckon or predict it…but I can tell I need it now.
The second time I did MDMA therapeutically (to do the MAPS protocol, you do a series of three sessions), the movement started immediately—and this time the therapist was prepped. He told me I had to make sound. This was incredibly hard for me. At first, I sounded like a mewling baby. He kept pushing me and pushing me until I began to vocalize, at which point the movement stopped.
Primal scream anyone? Honestly, it might be the one thing we all need, a way to discharge a blanket of anxiety that feels dense. But first, like little gazelles, we have to shake the fear out.
I'm delighted to see you share that the word "anxiety" comes from a Latin root meaning "to choke." I learned this a few years ago and it's one of my favorite etymological discoveries. I've shared it with many people and they are always surprised and then intrigued by the connection.
Thank you for writing about this with such an open lens. I feel anxiety is the thing that taps us rather than chases us. It is persistent, not sudden. Until its buildup boils over. I believe when fully understood, anxiety can be useful. Fear presents in the sudden moment. Anxiety is the future. They are different yet often thought of as twins.
Fear doesn’t hold hands with anxiety. Uncertainty does.
Which is why we are all so anxious in this country right now.
I’m grateful for your insight into somatic healing. While walking my dog in the woods yesterday I felt a sudden urge to take off my boots and socks. I stood barefoot on the earth for a few minutes (it was only 28 degrees here in MA so couldn’t stay for too long like that). The immediate response that had on my body can’t be overstated. When my mind is yanking me, the earth always grounds me.