Sometimes I watch the squirrels in my yard, eating an acorn, ever vigilant about their surroundings.  It keeps them alive of course, that anxious awareness of what's *possibly* out there.

My mental *default* is the same.  Any time my mind isn't occupied on something, any time there's a quietness, anxiety swooshes in, the way cold air swooshes into my room when I open my bedroom door in the morning.  *"What's wrong; something's wrong."*   It's an electric buzz, like when a 'normal' person suddenly remembers there's a big test tomorrow that he/she/they forgot to study for.

What CBT therapists don't understand, because they've never had anxiety like this, is that the negative thoughts come *after* the *feeling.*   We're not anxious because we think stupid, irrational, negative thoughts, we think those things *because* we *feel* 'something's wrong' and we're trying to fill in the abyss that comes along with the feeling.

It's a state of being, that *feeling.*  Free-floating anxiety.  The way air freely floats.

Some things have cures (like an appendectomy), and some things just *are*.

Medication helps...to a degree....depending on the person....

Mindfulness helps....to a degree.  Who wakes up in the morning and *immediately* is mindful of something external to their inner default?  Not me.  Though I have every trick in the book to get out of inner absorption, the anxiety that sucks one inward.

A lot of things help...to a degree.

At the end of the day, like so many unpleasant things that people just have to live with and cope with, one does the best one can.

"Everything can be taken from a person but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of cir­cumstances, to choose one's own way." -Viktor Frankl