The anxiety and existential dread is a normal reaction to the realisation, the real realisation, that you are a sapient mind that can think and observe reality and that existence exists and you are here in it. A thinking conscious being existing in the universe. The dread and anxiety is a physiological reaction, your meat and bone body isn't a fan of these thoughts, it would rather you just "got on with things".

You are becoming *more* than just an evolved ape going about the business of survival. You're starting to grasp the implications of what your consciousness is.

 

I had the dread and anxiety for a while. I was painfully and acutely aware that I was a conscious sapient mind in a body of flesh and bone standing on the surface of a planet spinning around a star. I would look up at the night sky and be absolutely aware that I was looking out at a universe and I was in it and I was a mind able to observe myself observing that I was a mind observing the universe.

Is that not a completely crazy situation? Why isn't everyone constantly just amazed and blown away by this realisation?

It would madden me that others didn't seem to grasp the absurdity and absolutely amazing reality of this. 

I wanted to scream at them, DO YOU NOT SEE HOW INSANE THIS IS!? What *are* we? 

We are sapient apes able to think about ourselves thinking, able to look out at the galaxy and cosmos around us and *see* it and *know* we're on a sphere of iron and rock being whipped through space by gravity through a galaxy, through a supercluster of galaxies in a vast and strange thing we call the universe... what the hell is going on?

But I got over the frustration, I learned to not care if nobody else was profoundly affected by what we are and the nature of our existence. The bizarre circumstances in which we find ourselves. I can feel that profundity, feel that shock and awe and *use it* to think about other things like it, to apply it to any and all other existential questions.

Keep doing it, keep invoking that feeling, the dread isn't needed, it will pass, be amazed instead, feel the wonder and awe that the realisation can bring.

You are a self aware consciousness existing in a universe able to observe it and yourself and observe yourself observing yourself observing the universe...

 How absolutely amazing and absurd, how wonderous...