Professional Fear vs. Professional Anxiety

Edy Nathan (Also on Substack)
3 min readOct 18, 2022
Christina @ wocintechchat.com| Unsplash

Fear and anxiety are often intertwined, acting as partners on the professional journey. These reactions are hard to ignore: they force a reckoning with doubts, disbelief, and the internal critic — this also means they can be unexpected allies. Standing up to fear and anxiety as a hero on this career journey is an excavation that allows movement past troubling states, and into synergistic ones.

Professional anxiety is rooted in fear: without fear, there is no anxiety. Fear, however, can exist without the presence of an anxiety response. When they’re present, they affect thinking, the psyche, and even the body: cold sweats, hyperventilation, the feeling of a pit in your stomach. Nothing about their presence feels releasing, especially when they are at their worst. If you have had thoughts quickly and incessantly running through your brain and found it difficult to track what’s going on or even how to slow things down to gather your thoughts, you have met anxiety and fear. Unforeseen professional circumstance is a potent state that can also offer insights into how you react to certain information. From there, we gather information on needs as well as what to avoid. What you’re left with are self-soothing tools that will serve you for a lifetime.

Tell the Difference

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Edy Nathan (Also on Substack)
Edy Nathan (Also on Substack)

Written by Edy Nathan (Also on Substack)

Author of “It’s Grief: The Dance of Self-Discovery Through Trauma and Loss” | Blogger for Psychology Today, Thrive Health | Psychotherapist | amzn.to/30vkR2W📕

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