[schoen]

We might say that anxiety is saying "you should mitigate this threat or fix this problem" or "you should mitigate this threat now! you should fix this problem now!".

A challenge is that we don't know how to mitigate every threat or fix every problem, and we may never be able to do so in our current situations or in our whole lives.

So there can be an additional challenge of saying "yep, I got the message, and unfortunately I've actually done what I can about this issue at this time!". (And maybe, if I remember correctly what I thought I understood from the SF Zen Center's anxiety class, "I appreciate that I'm a person who cares about mitigating this threat or fixing this problem; it's great that I can see the value and urgency of this".)

We might say that, evolutionarily, acute anxiety, like acute physical pain from an injury, is hard to turn off merely by saying that we've gotten the message. Anxiety and pain serve as reminders of some of the most urgent problems we face, where procrastination could be very detrimental. But sometimes we need to find a way to say WONTFIX.