anxiety is an identity issue...up to a point

Too much strain in other areas of life make our tolerance for anxiety lower. Being stretched is good, but stretch someone too much in a direction that doesn't conform to their current identity and you'll produce strain. This is the damaging form that anxiety can take. People are more anxious nowadays about small things than ever before. Strain in other parts of their life is partly to blame. But also an identity in which 'being anxious' is OK rather than re-framed as being keyed up before something testing. Maybe because the testing is not really taken seriously (because it doesn't fit in with overall identity). So really it makes sense to have a flexible identity, reverse engineered so that anxiety will be interpreted as a challenge rather than a mental health threat. Such an identity might be entrepreneur, film and video-maker, explorer, social-activist...things that are open ended rather than the more closed artist, writer, academic student. Some identities, ancient and modern work better than others. Like names, they have a magic to them, of sorts.