Where does my anxiety actually come from?

I've personally dealt with massive amounts of anxiety, and most of what we learn in life is learned through our own struggles. With anxiety there is always an underlying mechanism at work, which is control. The Holy Fathers tell us we don't have feelings unless we have thoughts. We experience the feeling and overlook all the thoughts that led up to it. That's where we use what the Holy Fathers call nepsis, watchfulness: being attentive to the thoughts we allow into our mind, because the thoughts are what provoke the feelings.

If you take one thing away, let it be that. With anxiety, our thoughts are dominated by two desires. One is get: we're afraid we're not going to get what we want, so we try to control and manipulate the situation to make things go our way, yet other people have their own will, and life is maddeningly out of our control. The second is lose: we're afraid of losing what we already have.

Think of a parent afraid of losing a child. That can become paralyzing fear manifesting as anxiety. So any time we're in anxiety, we should immediately look at our thoughts and ask, am I afraid of not getting what I want, or am I afraid of losing something that I have? People think anxiety is irrational, but once you pinpoint that friction point, the emotion is actually a natural response to the unknown. At the core, we want our own will. We are trying to dominate life by our will. That is the control component.