This article is the last in my mini-series on fear, stress and anxiety.

In the United States today, nearly 100 million adults—more than 40 percent of the population—regularly use some chemical substance to manage anxiety.

Conservative estimates say that roughly 82 million drink alcohol weekly, 18–30 million use marijuana or some other form of THC, and another 25–30 million take prescription anxiolytics such as Xanax® (Alprazolam), Klonopin® (Clonazepam), or Ativan® (Lorazepam). These groups overlap (some people drink, smoke and take pills), but even when adjusted for co-use, the number remains staggering.

The result is that a massive chunk of the population; many of the people I know, and many of the people you know, are stoned all day and probably all night on benzodiazepines and/or cannabinoids and other substances, and use alcohol to “take the edge off.” And these numbers don’t include the rapid increase in the number of SSRI prescriptions and THC usage among children under 18.

So tens of millions of people regularly rely upon some external substance to manage their lives. They never learn the difference between stress and anxiety, and they are not motivated to manage the causes of anxiety.

Stress isn’t Anxiety

The stress of life is real. Life is harsh, short, demanding, and no matter how you look at it—competitive. The good news is that we are built specifically to handle these stressors. Not just to maintain, but to thrive.

Stress initiates powerful physical and psychological responses.  When faced with a stressor, your amygdala (deep in your ancient, “reptilian” brain) activates your hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis, which then releases cortisol and adrenaline into your body.

The result is sympathetic arousal: glycogen and glucose are released as fuel for your muscles, and muscle tension, cardiac output, breathing and sensory acuity all increase. You can see and hear better and you are ready to fight off or run from threats. I have discussed this response in more detail previously.

Moderate stress also sharpens your psychological abilities, like focus, motivation, and goal-directed behavior. Stress is a powerful learning signal that helps you encode important information (“remember this; it mattered!”). This is why you can remember where you were when JFK was assassinated in 1963, or during the Challenger disaster in January of 1985, or on 9/11/2001, or the Israeli massacre on October 7, 2023 (or all of the above, if you are of a certain vintage).

And—this is important and relevant to our discussion—stress enables resilience calibration, which is your ability to create psychological hardiness to manage future stressors. This is the basis of psychological adaptation.

Stress also has social and cultural benefits. When a group of people face a stressor, they quickly build cohesion and interpersonal bonds, increase creativity, problem-solving, and innovation.


After all this, if you’re thinking that stress is a good thing, you’re not wrong. stress can be (and has been, as a species) our greatest ally.

But stress isn’t the same as anxiety.

Anxiety isn’t Helpful

In simplified terms:

Stress is the response to a current demand.

Anxiety is a response to what might happen.

The problem is that there is no enemy to fight or flee, and no end signal for all of that cortisol and epinephrine. So you stay in a stress response condition indefinitely, running around with your breathing and heart rate elevated, eyes dilated and muscles tense, digestion on stand-by and glucose elevated. For days, weeks and months (years!) on end.

You are chasing ghosts; exhausting yourself to fight a foe that doesn’t exist.

This makes you ill, psychically and psychologically, because it is an unnatural state. We were built to identify a threat, deal with it and move on. Hans Selye called this the General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS), and I have talked about it at length on other occasions, so I won’t revisit it here. Suffice to say that when you are always in a state of “fight or flight,” exhaustion—of body and mind—soon follows.

Anxiety, then, is the enemy, not stress. Anxiety is a supercharged state of worry. And worry is just one in a long list of names for fear.

What are You Afraid Of?

Anxiety is the feeling of being afraid all the time.

Fear masquerades in many guises; procrastination, “laziness,“ perfectionism. When you begin to feel like there’s nothing you can do to protect yourself, you just give up. We call this learned helplessness, and it is one of the primary causes of situational depression. If unresolved, this can become clinical depression.

We are afraid of everything. Nuclear war, extinction of the species, destruction of the planet, loss of our own personal lives, loss of loved ones, loss of our mental health (ironically), loss of our incomes, our homes, our ability to function independently, our status, our relationships, our material possessions and on and on.

Now watch closely, as I pull a modern epidemic out of my hat, er…laptop:

Follow the logic: we consume huge doses of fear every day, and this is not by accident. Billions of dollars are spent in every source of media, from TV news to your social media, in a calculated effort to cause you to be afraid.

Global warming will melt the polar ice caps and displace 100 million people in the Pacific by 2015! COVID-19 will kill a higher percentage of the global population than the 1918 flu epidemic! Eggs cause sudden cardiac arrest! This has been going on for many decades.

Every media source inundates you with the same message: be afraid! And that constant fear is anxiety. But why? Who wins when an entire population is constantly anxious?

The response to all of this catstrophizing is to get you to spend trillions of dollars on the chemical substances that will cause you to feel a little bit less of that fear and anxiety. Think about it: what commercials do you see interspersed between the reports that the sky is falling?

Oh yeah; pharmaceutical ads: “Ask your doctor if (insert latest drug here) is right for you. Side-effects may include sudden death, blindness, cancer, uncontrollable infections, spontaneous combustion and loss of your soul to the devil.”



So take those pills and wear those masks and stay home and drive electric vehicles, and get immunized and for God’s sake, SHELTER IN PLACE!

No wonder you’re anxious.

It should be obvious, at this point, how this all works together. This simple, two step system keeps a small number of people in the media and pharmaceutical-industrial complex extremely rich, at the same time that it keeps you sick, weak, docile, and easily controlled.

(Far be it from me to venture into the murky waters of conspiracy theory—now there’s something scary! But Aldous Huxley, Wilhelm Reich, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Michel Foucault, R.D. Laing, Thomas Szasz, Noam Chomsky, Neil Postman, Carl Elliott, Gabor Maté, Andrew Scull and many others have had something to say along those lines.)

Equally as obvious is what you need to do to break free from the anxiety.

Stop the Madness

Step One is to remove yourself from as many sources of fear as possible. Especially the ones that are engineered to keep you buying weed and Xanax®.

Turn off the damn TV. Step away from the damn iPhone (or Android; I’m brand agnostic here). Limit your YouTube and X time (they call it doom scrolling for a reason. Seriously, dear readers—I’m not advocating for a tech-less Luddite society, I just want you all to be healthy.

Protect Your Peace. Misery—as it is correctly said—loves company. Remove yourself from the presence of people who are worried and bitter and cynical and disappointed, and spend the majority of their conversation with you whining and complaining and worrying. Those people aren’t your friends, they are just looking for someone to roll in the fear with them.

And if you are one of those people, STOP IT.

There are people out there who value their lives; who are grateful and optimistic. There are people who want to talk about progress and peace and purpose, who work to build others up and see them succeed. These folks have what the mystics call a higher vibratory rate: find them.

Step Two is to learn, or possibly relearn, about your mind and body’s unique abilities to deal with stress and turn it into fuel for a better life. 

One of the most important things about learning how to manage your anxiety is learning how to manage your anxiety. Remember resilience calibration; your ability to gain psychological strength to deal with stress? It doesn’t happen if you are so medicated you don’t feel the stress in the first place.

Learn how to breathe and think and plan in a way that calms your anxiety, when it arises*, and with practice you will find that anxiety is less and less prevalent in your life.

Get. Out. Of. The. House. Go outside and play. Spend some time in nature with your guard down and your heart rate up (we call that exercise).

Listen to music that makes you smile.

Read.


Read some more.


Think about your finite life: go to church or a yoga class, or sit by a river.

Pray or meditate or journal. Make music or write a story or paint a picture.

Burn some incense, stretch, do some Tai Chi; get a massage or some acupuncture.

Stay hydrated (really).

Don’t isolate. Get with other happy people who are happy to see you and talk about happy things, like choosing their purpose in life.

Do something for someone else. Even something that seems trivial to you can make someone’s day. We are all connected—this is truth.

Step Three—if you have already been caught in the fear-and-medicate trap—is to slowly and carefully eliminate the external chemical substances that you used to be dependent upon, to return to a normal state of vibrant mental and physical health. You gotta do the things, at least some of them, in Step Two first, though. Work on your natural, no side-effects, healthy peace before—and as—you wean yourself from the chemicals. Then STOP ALL OF THEM.

Serious warning: Some of the substances that millions of people are on are so toxic—benzodiazepines, for example—that if you remove them from your system abruptly, it can kill you. Please seek out the advice of a well-trained and experienced professional before you attempt to wean yourself away from any substance that you have been using regularly for a long time.

Treat the Cause, Not the Symptom

You deserve to be free from anxiety.

You owe it to yourself, your family and your friends and your community.

As you start to understand good stress (eustress) and bad stress (distress; anxiety), how to use good stress to achieve your goals, and how to negate the effects of anxiety naturally, in a healthy way, you will find that you automatically eliminate many of the things that you are currently afraid of.

As your lifestyle becomes healthier and your mind clears, you may even regain the greatest gift of all—the pursuit of your purpose; the reason that you are here in the first place.

Once you have that handled, you can get on with the business of Hardcore Happiness: a life of sustained joy, satisfaction, and well-being. And I’m here to help you with that, every step of the way, no substances needed…

As always, I truly wish you peace.



*Get my FREE guide, Five Ways to Calm Anxiety NOW! at JeffWWelsh.com —click the big orange button on the Home page—(or just click this link)!


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- JWW