Fear can provoke action on your part, or it can paralyze you to the point, nothing gets done and your survival is in question. The middle ground between fight and flight is a higher level of anxiety, impulsiveness, and just general uneasiness. There are highs and lows, a rush for a while and then fatigue sets in. This can be both damaging physically and emotionally.
Often times fear can be controlled by confronting what you fear. Once you confront it, you can in some cases, control the fear, eliminate it as a threat all together, or at the very least reduce the anxiety, because often times it is never as bad as you had imagined.
There are more than enough threats to go around, to many to count in fact, in this world and some of them do require a healthy respect for the dangers involved. Analyze and then decide what is most likely down to the near impossible. The only way to make a determination is by gathering information.
EMP attacks seem to be on everyone’s mind and they should be, but not to the exclusion of everything else. You can spend all of your time preparing for one thing only to have a wildfire, tornado, or some other disaster strike. You can spend a tremendous amount of money, time and energy on one threat, because of fear, and this could make you actually less prepared.
Evaluate threats realistically, and then teach yourself the skills needed to counter that threat. In most cases, however, the skills learned are not disaster specific, they can be used to counter the majority of threats. You cannot destroy or eliminate many of the threats, you can only prepare to a level that allows you to survive the threat.
Fear can make you compulsive, and it can cause financial problems. You can convince yourself and your spouse/partner that you need specific materials and gear all out of fear. You can spend thousands of dollars on radiation suits, Faraday cages, on vehicles that can survive an EMP and the list goes on. Soon the money is all gone and yet the sun still rises and sets and you are still broke.
Someone on the Internet is always screaming about this or that threat that will happen on such and such a date. Someone has a video that reveals all, you have to get ready for this one, and it is coming, fear mongering sells.
Of course, something is coming. Death comes to us all. The world ends for tens of thousands of people daily. Do you want to spend every day prepping in a state of panic, fearing the sunrise or sunset, or do you want to calmly, and logically continue to prep on and hope nothing happens.
It all comes down to whom to believe. You can literally buy into every conspiracy theory that comes along by running out and buying something. You can instead, prepare sensibly because you know tornadoes, hurricanes, snowstorms and other disasters are not conspiracies or theories they are real and they will happen.
Keep everything in mind but do not let fear sidetrack you. If an EMP scares you to death, well then you have to face it, learn about it, and decide if it is something that you can prepare for, or even need to prepare for.
Once you study and gather information you may decide some threats are much ado about nothing. This is not to say that any threat you fear is not a dangerous one, but do not decide how dangerous something is until you have researched it thoroughly.