Adding onto this, an important difference between “anxiety” and “heightened attentiveness” is that anxiety has a lot to do with not knowing what to do. If you have a lot of experience driving cars and losing traction, and life or death scenarios, then when it happens you know what to do and just focus on doing it. If you’re full of anxiety, it’s likely that you don’t actually have any good responses ready if the tires do lose traction, and beyond not having a good response to enact you can’t even focus on performing the best response you do have because your attention is also being tugged towards “I don’t have a good way to respond and this is a problem!”.
Adding onto this, an important difference between “anxiety” and “heightened attentiveness” is that anxiety has a lot to do with not knowing what to do. If you have a lot of experience driving cars and losing traction, and life or death scenarios, then when it happens you know what to do and just focus on doing it. If you’re full of anxiety, it’s likely that you don’t actually have any good responses ready if the tires do lose traction, and beyond not having a good response to enact you can’t even focus on performing the best response you do have because your attention is also being tugged towards “I don’t have a good way to respond and this is a problem!”.