What's the difference between fear and anxiety?

Are they the same?

Does it matter?

I do think that understanding the difference between fear and anxiety can actually help you to lower your anxiety.

In popular usage, these terms are often used interchangeably. And obviously words change as common usage changes.

However, in the scientific field, the difference between fear and anxiety is seen as quite important.

Fear occurs when the threat is real and present.

Anxiety is the emotion we feel when we are anticipating an event, or sometimes it's physical feelings of anxiety that are not tied to an obvious immediate threat.

Let me use some pictures to show this. Alright, you got the dinosaur there. You don't think about it. You don't ponder what to do.

You don't go through a lot of machinations mentally, right? You run or hide or freeze. That's our fight, flight, freeze response, kicking in immediately because you got a dinosaur there.

So when you have the thought of a dinosaur and know it will be dangerous, then you feel anxiety.

The man faced with the dinosaur has a fear response that clicks in immediately - BOOM! His adrenaline spiked, his muscles tensed, his heart rate went up. His digestive system probably stopped working. He had a single-minded focus, right?

A focus to RUN!

Let's go to the person who thinks about the threat of a dinosaur. (And I do know that none of you are worried about the threat of a dinosaur! But whatever the threat is, let's just give it the picture of a dinosaur).

The thought of the dinosaur makes the person worry, and, immediately, their body is flooded with adrenaline. Muscles tense, heart rate goes up, pulse goes out of control. Some people might sweat. Our digestive systems shut down, and we are single-mindedly focused on a danger that is not in front of us.

So all those chemical and physical reactions that kick in when immediate threat is present, they kick in when you worry about something. BUT your body doesn't need to run. You don't need to fight, flee, or hide. But you feel like you do.

Now, there's been some debate in the scientific community about what actually is happening in the brain when somebody feels fear and somebody feels anxiety. There is agreement, however, that our defensive circuits kick in right away with both fear and with anxiety. There is some scientific research showing that the response is almost exactly the same between the two.

With anxiety, we have more ability to use our frontal lobe to calm the other parts of the brain, to help ourselves realize “The threat is not here now.” But this takes practice and effort. And we often are not taught how to do that.

So the reason I think this can be super helpful for you to understand if you have anxiety is that you can begin to try to calm your body physically. You can reassure yourself that the chemical response you're having is not tied to the event you're nervous about.  Somatic interventions such as diaphragmatic breathing and grounding exercises can help you lower your anxious response, which then helps you think more clearly.

I know this is super difficult to do, but it's possible. It helps to understand that your body is having an overblown response to a possible future threat or danger, and probably it's also a response that would be appropriate if it were a physical danger, like your life is in danger.

Most of the things we worry about are not immediate bodily threats.

When we physically confuse anxiety with fear, and have a strong fear response to anticipatory anxiety, our brains get wired to respond in that manner. If we repeat this a few times, it becomes a habitual pattern.

As things are habituated, we actually create superhighways in our brain where the different neurons firing are tied to fire together in the same patterns.

I do have a free webinar which explains this further, Rewire Your Brain for Joy and Confidence. This webinar also provides scientific research that shows you CAN rewire your brain. You actually can do this. You can access the webinar with this link: Rewire Your Brain For Joy and Confidence



This post can help you lower your anxiety by understanding the difference between fear and anxiety. Understanding that your body chemically responds to anxiety in the same way that it responds to fear can help you begin to calm your body physically when you feel anxious. Somatic interventions can be very effective if you would like to calm anxiety.