Anxiety has no object, and that is exactly the problem

Tillich draws a sharp distinction between fear and anxiety: fear has a specific object — a dog, an illness, a deadline — that can be confronted, fled from, or defeated, giving the fearful person something concrete to act on. Anxiety, by contrast, is the awareness of the possibility of one's own nonbeing, and nonbeing cannot be fought, negotiated with, or outrun, since it isn't a thing but the absence of everything.

This is why anxiety feels so much more disorienting and paralyzing than fear: there's no strategy that resolves it the way strategy resolves a fear. Tillich argues that much of what looks like modern psychological distress is anxiety disguising itself as fear, as people latch onto specific worries — health, money, relationships — that feel more manageable than confronting the objectless dread underneath.

His proposed solution isn't to eliminate anxiety, which he considers impossible for a conscious, finite being, but to develop the courage that can absorb anxiety into a fuller life rather than being paralyzed by it.

Takeaway: you cannot defeat anxiety the way you defeat fear, because anxiety was never fighting on those terms to begin with.