I second this. We all have unique brains, and it seems to me that some people are naturally less prone to anxiety than others. I know plenty of people who seem to have naturally low anxiety, and as far as I can tell, they never needed to have some profound realization to become like this, they were likely born this way, they have lucky genetics.

Anxiety means your brain has more of a tendency to worry about potential threats. Possibly because your amygdala are more easily activated. It may just be that, back when we lived in the savannah, being easily aroused by potential threats, and being overly careful, was in many ways beneficial for survival. However, we live in a time of relative safety, and it seems that being someone who worries a lot about potential threats is not generally a useful trait.

I'm not saying that there's nothing you can do to manage anxiety, that is obviously false, but I'm saying there's a strong genetic component, and that judging people who appear more anxious and telling them just suck it up shows a fundamental lack of self-awareness and understanding of how the human brain works.

I agree: one's goal has to be to create a fulfilling life (whatever that means to one) with the nervous system you actually have. Wishing things away rarely works with mental/emotional realities. There's many ways to manage the reality of your specific self; e.g., I'm pretty anxious, so I start every day I can with a nice relaxing bath, during which I am free of anxiety. However, I don't try to make myself be free of anxiety when I have to speak up in some tense situation; then I use mindfulness techniques to just be aware and persist despite it all. Sometimes I do things to change my internal self, sometimes I just treat it like a person that needs certain random things to be at top performance. It depends.

I'll throw my anecdotal experience in life thus far in the ring. I turned 30 this year and I haven't really ever experienced anything more than mild stress, and even that is fairly infrequent (once or twice a year at most, and always because there is something that a reasonable person would say is worth stressing over).

I have been this way my entire life and as far as I'm aware it didn't come about from some life experience, I think I was just born like this. My mother used to laugh that everything was "like water off a duck's back" to me.

All throughout school and University I never once was stressed about any piece of assessment or any exams. There were a few I was woefully unprepared for and knew I would likely fail, but it never really bothered me. It wasn't that I didn't care, I just never saw the point in worrying as worrying is never going to change anything.

My wife is the opposite. She stresses about everything, many things that are completely out of her control. I have learnt a lot about how to support someone in that frame of mind, even when I don't understand why they are stressed.

This does have downsides. Many people, especially in professional contexts, mistake my stress free and easygoing nature as laziness. I also have relatively low empathy, though I'm not sure if that's a side effect, cause, or completely unrelated.

I've studied the area of developmental psychology a lot, and all evidence points to neuroticism, anxiety being not genetic but a result of developmental trauma. Adverse childhood experiences, missatunemenmet with the primary caregiver leads to an area of the brain responsible with affect regulation not being developed properly. Infants learn to regulate affect from parents (the mother or the primary caregiver).

Another case of reverse causation.