How to define and handle anxiety.
Some preliminary thoughts:
Fear & hope-- both are about the future one about predicting only the best the other about predicting the worst.
Hope and fear are the same; both are projections into the future about things we do not control. Both are the enemy of the present moment that you are actually in.
Both mean you're living a life in opposition to Amor Fati.* It's not about overcoming our fears but understanding that both hope and fear contain a dangerous amount of want and worry in them and sadly the connection is that the want causes the worry! * (Amor fati is a Latin phrase that may be translated as "love of fate" or "love of one's fate". It is used to describe an attitude in which one sees everything that happens in one's life, including suffering and loss, as good or, at the very least, necessary.[1] Amor fati is often associated with what Friedrich Nietzsche called "eternal recurrence", the idea that, over an infinite period of time, everything recurs infinitely. From this he developed a desire to be willing to live exactly the same life over and over for all eternity ("...long for nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal”).[2]
One type of anxiety comes from the fact that fortunate is often fickle(leading to false expectations) so it's best to refer to philosophers that have quoted things like Epictetus a Greek philosopher who said "what really frightens and dismays us is not external events themselves but the way in which we think about them.. it is not things that disturb us but our interpretation of their significance.
Buddha said "our life is the creation of our mind" or Shakespeare "there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so" or Milton "the mind is its own place and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven."