Fear vs Anxiety

How do you differentiate between anxiety and fear? I know the definitions of the words, but I have been under the assumption that anxiety and fear are the same for so long that it's kind of messing with my head. Give real-life examples if you would.

As far as I see it, a fear causes anxiety. I am fearful of large groups of people, and it causes me to be anxious. Anxiety manifests itself differently in people. In me, it causes me to feel stressed, nervuos, 'edgy', etc.

Kevin

Anxiety, to me, is to be in constant expectation of something, bad or good, to happen. Fear occurs when you want, with all you've got, for something to go the way A, not the way B.

Example - someone dear to you is late coming home. You're first annoyed, then you start getting anxious - you want to know whether something happened or not; you need to know. Then, when it's late enough for it to be clear something's happened indeed, anxiety turns to fear - you start praying, if you're a believer, that they are safe, for you dread they aren't.

But, as Chucky pointed out, when it comes to daily life, anxiety and fear are often mingled and a cause for each other.

Yes, I think those are good explanations. The difference isn't always clear to me either.

Another example might be, some are afraid of failure, so trying difficult/unfamiliar things or things they may have failed at in the past makes them anxious. I'm afraid of embarrassing myself in front of large groups of people, so public speaking makes me anxious.

Anxiety can sometimes turn into fear too I think. If I believed that public speaking inevitably causes me embarrassment every time, then I might begin to fear it rather than just be anxious about it. I guess anxiety is more anticipatory, like Mittinana said, and driven by fear, like Kevin said. Fear, on the other hand, is more immediate and is driven by hopelessness. Hopelessness is akin to misery, pain, and hatred.

The opposite of fear, hopelessness, and hatred is faith, hope, and love. Ideally the latter should be our motivation, but we're often too attached to material things to make the switch.

Chucky defined it pretty well, so I'll just give an example.

I'm afraid of heights. If I were to, hypothetically, go skydiving, I would feel extremely anxious. Fear is the established belief that the stimulus (in this case, heights) is dangerous/harmful/etc., and anxiety is the physical (and emotional) response when exposed to the stimulus.

S3 wrote:Anxiety can sometimes turn into fear too I think. If I believed that public speaking inevitably causes me embarrassment every time, then I might begin to fear it rather than just be anxious about it. I guess anxiety is more anticipatory, like Mittinana said, and driven by fear, like Kevin said. Fear, on the other hand, is more immediate and is driven by hopelessness. Hopelessness is akin to misery, pain, and hatred.

Yes, I can see how that can work. They really do go hand-in-hand though, don't they? - I man fear and anxiety. You'll even see books out there with titles containing both words in them. You'll even see people use the terms interchangeably in sentences. Like, everyone is anxious/fearful of speaking in public at first, but I guess some take it to the extreme and their anxiety becomes uncontrollable. This heightens their fear too.

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*nods* Yeah. They really are interchangeable in many cases. Anxiety may be a kind of fear, but not all fear is anxiety. Hence the confusion I suppose.