Verified by 
Fear and anxiety are closely related. Both contain the idea of a danger or possibility of injury. To experience fear is to know that you are in danger. In general, fear is seen as a reaction to a specific, observable danger, while anxiety is seen as a kind of unfocused, objectless, future-oriented fear. Fear is anxiety that is attached to a specific thing or circumstance. For instance, worries about dying are more likely to take the form of nagging anxiety than specific fear. The ambiguous nature of anxiety makes it difficult to overcome. If we don’t know the source of our anxiety, it is difficult to deal with the problem.
Anxious people also suffer from interpretation biases in responding to uncertainty and threats. People with anxiety disorders experience this in the extreme.
1. Hypervigilance. Anxious individuals pay too much attention to threats. In extreme cases nearly anything can be threatening and trigger defensive behavior. Threats capture attention and direct it to the threat. For example, cues about spider capture spider phobics’ attention and direct to the threat. People with panic disorder can be unusually attuned to body sensations that might signal an attack. This focused on threats can prevent attention being paid to other factors that under normal conditions might improve the biased response.
2. Impaired ability to know the difference between threat and safety. People with anxiety disorders often experience impaired ability in detecting the difference between danger and safety. For example, an anxious person can only feel safe in social situations if attended by a friend. This bias is long considered to involve a failure of the prefrontal cortex to properly regulate the emotional brain (amygdala).
3. Avoidance. Fear and anxiety are unpleasant feelings, and fearful or anxious people want to eliminate them. Avoidance is an important feature of anxiety disorders to prevent exposure to threat. Avoidance becomes so habitual that the brain never has the opportunity to recognize between threat and safety. Over time, the anxious person falsely believes that the avoidance choice prevented danger.
4. Overreaction to uncertainty. Uncertainty is the breeding ground of anxiety. People with anxiety have trouble tolerating uncertainty or threat. Uncertainty about the future and how to prepare for various possible outcomes is a significant factor in fear and anxiety disorders.
5. Exaggeration of threat significance and likelihood. People with anxiety disorders view negative events as much more likely to occur, and expect more severe consequences as a result. This bias leads to anticipatory stress when any negative outcome is envisioned, no matter how improbable the outcome. The process of blowing things out of proportion leads the worrier to ask automatic questions of the “what if?” kind and by doing so the individual sees the worst case scenario. For instance, someone with health anxiety believes that bodily sensations or changes are indicative of disease and experiences anxiety that are out of proportion with the objective degree of medical risk.
Similar to a concert pianist, an anxious person develops brain muscles (neural pathways) of anxiety through hours of daily practice. Research shows that teaching people to reappraise emotional stimuli can reduce the biased judgments and also dampen amygdala activity. For example, participants who are instructed to think about something pleasant when a negatively charged stimulus is presented rate the stimulus as less arousing.
