When you’re lonely, you don’t become cripplingly hopeless and withdraw from life? You just contact some friends or easily make new friends and have a good time and carry on with life?
When you’re driving your car and everything is fine until you come to a stoplight, you don’t suddenly become depressed at the stoplight like I do?
When you wake up every morning, you don’t have crippling existential dread? You just get up and go about your day cheerfully, without analyzing the futile meaninglessness of the big picture?
As someone having just graduaded from crippling anxiety to only being moderately stressed I find that the only difference between those two states of mind is the lack of the previous negative emotion. It’s not like I gained a new emotion or my existing ones somehow evolved. It’s more like you have pain and then wake up one morning and no longer do. Everything else is the same - just no more pain.
When asked about what does success feel like a person replied that it feels like a relief. I think that’s pretty accurate.