Why does my anxiety feel different from fear?

Anxiety differs from fear in that it lacks a specific, identifiable threat in the present moment. While fear responds to immediate danger, anxiety reflects anticipation of potential future threats or generalized arousal without clear cause. The physiological responses overlap, but the triggering mechanisms differ. The autonomic nervous system operates through learned associations between environmental cues and past events. When similar patterns appear in the present, the system activates the same physiological responses that occurred during previous threatening situations. This creates a feedback loop where heightened arousal generates more scanning behavior, which in turn reinforces the sense of danger. Chronic activation depletes the body's resources over time. The system remains in a state of readiness that was originally a response to specific circumstances but has become a default mode of operation. Neural pathways that fire repeatedly become strengthened, making the activated state increasingly automatic and difficult to interrupt through conscious effort alone.