Where does anxiety come from? || Acharya Prashant, with youth (2012)

Question: Why do I often feel anxiety?

Acharya Prashant: Anxiety is a thought. If you want you can be anxious right now, you can call thoughts of anxiety, and you will see that you have become anxious. Call forth the memories that make you stressful, and within few minutes you will feel stressed. Just call those thoughts of stress and those memories that disturb you, and you will find that within two to three minutes you will be stressed and disturbed. This can be done right now.

Anxiety is thought. The presence of thought implies the lack of attention. In understanding, thoughts cannot dominate.

Man is a sandwich; there is a dual nature that is available to us. We can live in reality, while simultaneously imagining an alternate reality. You can be here in a physical way while your mind can be somewhere else. Now, the reality and the imagined reality can never meet each other. And that exactly is the conflict. You are here and your mind is somewhere else, and that is what leads to anxiety.

All anxiety is imagination. In understanding of the present, energetic action starts and anxiety disappears.