The Difference Between Anxiety And Fears

Anxiety is when irrational thoughts paralyze you to point where you have to change what you’re thinking about or you might start crying. Because although you know your greatest fear might not become a reality, all the what if it does is what haunts you.

Anxiety keeps you awake at night when you are so exhausted because you can’t stop thinking. You can’t stop replaying what happened, you can’t stop analyzing a situation wondering was it your fault? Wondering how you can fix it.

Anxiety makes you think you need to fix something that isn’t even a problem, to begin with.

Anxiety tells you, it is your fault. It’s always your fault even when it’s not your fault, it is.

Anxiety is what keeps you up at night because you’re afraid you might sleep through your alarm when you have to be somewhere. Instead of trusting the fact your alarm has never failed you before you wonder if this time it will?

Anxiety are moments of being paranoid and insecure as a million lies run through your head and you have to learn to separate what’s a real worry and what’s an anxiety-prone one.

It’s the whispers of someone across the room and you wonder are they talking about you? It’s that voice that says no one likes you and here are 10 reasons why.

Anxiety turns you into your own worst enemy. Watching self-destruction play out fully.

Anxiety is the fear of not doing something well so you procrastinate doing it at all. And you know it’d be easier had you tackled whatever the task was at hand in parts but you don’t.

Anxiety is the voice that adds doubt to every moment of certainty.

Anxiety makes you question everyone in your life even though you have no reason to.

It’s the fear of someone leaving, even though they’ve proven to you they are going to stay for the long haul.

It’s the fear of relationships because you’re always going to be the one who needs more.

You feel bad needing that much of someone. You feel bad needing constant reassurance. You feel bad apologizing as much as you do. You feel bad talking as much as you do. You hide the parts of yourself you don’t like but eventually, it comes out.

Anxiety is this obstacle you learn to continue to navigate around because you’ve come to terms with not being able to get rid of it. So you learn to live the most normal life you can while watching it affect you.

Anxiety is excusing yourself from dinner because there’s something you need to take care of at this moment or else.

Anxiety is staring at a clock as you run late and you hate being late to places. So you drive a little faster, go through that yellow light, keep looking at the clock and you get there on time and everything is okay. But if you show up five minutes late it irks you.

Anxiety is your inability to rely on others for things because you like being in control. You know that if it’s you taking responsibility the outcome is all because of you. You try to control parts of your life to make up for the fact this little thing controls you.

So you’re very careful with the things you do and everything you say because you know anxiety pushes you to interpret things incorrectly.

Every text. Every email. Every word. It’s so thought out and rethought about and reworded and deleted and rewritten and reread and sent to others for their opinion.

Anxiety is the fear of making choices out of the fear of making the wrong one.

Anxiety is that love-hate relationship you have with drinking because sober you might be at a party and social anxiety creeps up. You take a few shots or drinks and it’s amazing how when you’re drunk it’s the closest you’ll ever come to not having anxiety disorder. So you drink more to maintain this false reality you wish could be yours.

You talk too much and say too many things without thinking too much about it.

Then you wake up the next day and you hate yourself for what you might have done. Moral hangovers when you have anxiety are far worse than anything else. You’re convinced you ruined every relationship and you don’t have any reasoning behind it really because there are parts you don’t remember and that’s what scares you.

When that tightknit anxiety prone ball that is you is unwound you don’t like the version of yourself that doesn’t care what people think. When you have anxiety you care so much about what people think about you. And when they don’t like you, you pick yourself apart even more.

Anxiety is watching everyone closely. You pick up on the smallest of details. An eye roll. A change in pitch. Body language. While anxiety might make you the most paranoid fuck in the entire world and there are things you make up in your own mind, you also notice things about that the average person doesn’t that maybe they don’t even notice about themselves.

And while all of this is going on in your mind on the surface you are calm just watching. And no one notices. No one sees how much this is affecting you. Because when you have anxiety if there’s one thing you learn to be good at is lying.

You lie to others to hide your greatest flaw.

You lie to yourself when you say unkind things and believe it.

Anxiety is about how good you can fake being normal. But under of the surface of that is a racing heart, a strange habit of picking or tapping learning to cope when you have an anxiety attack and understanding yourself well enough to know your triggers and how to try and fix.

But the thing is there is no fixing anxiety there’s just learning how to coexist with it, learning how to control it without letting it control you.

It’s more than just a worry. Anxiety is a way of life that no one would ever choice if they could.

The truth is anxiety is painful and emotionally exhausting. It’s you being your own worst enemy when everyone in the world tells you to love yourself.

Anxiety is that voice that tries to take that from you.

Living with anxiety is making the choice every single day to not let this thing define me.