The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. There�s an interesting postscript to that oft-repeated quotation from President Franklin D Roosevelt�s first inaugural address.

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. There's an interesting postscript to that oft-repeated quotation from President Franklin D Roosevelt's first inaugural address. On March 5 1933, the very next day, FDR sat alone in his wheelchair in an empty, cheerless Oval Office for the first time and was suddenly overwhelmed by a sense of horror at the scale of his task in the midst of the Great Depression. Already paralysed from the waist down by polio, for a few moments he felt completely paralysed by fear. Imagine him there: heart racing, blood pumping, breathing fast, muscles tensed, sweating freely, veins contracting, mouth dry. Maybe he felt dizzy and sick.

Probably his hands shook slightly. Fear is reckoned to be our most powerful emotion. It sets off a chain of bodily sensations and triggers a series of signals through the brain, activating the thalamus, hypothalamus and amygdala.

Fear is in the news again. A report this week from the Mental Health Foundation - In the Face of Fear - suggests that our individual and communal fears, many of them misconceived or exaggerated, are both exacerbating the economic downturn and hindering recovery. When we worry about our jobs and fear for the future, we spend and lend less, avoid risk and feed economic paralysis. As fear overrides logical thinking, the crisis deepens. Half of us are worrying about money and two-thirds are anxious about the credit crunch. Women and younger people feel most frightened but 77% are more fearful than they used to be. High levels of fear and anxiety have a knock-on effect on the levels of coronary heart disease, gastrointestinal problems, asthma and allergies. They raise our blood pressure and make us more likely to smoke and drink more and eat junk.

There's a strange paradox here because we need fear. Stone age man needed it to flee charging sabre-toothed tigers. I need it to fill this space, rather than swan off for a long lunch. But good stress becomes bad stress when, forced to work harder and harder in constantly downsizing companies, people rarely feel they have done a good job, or when 100 jobs applications fail to produce a single offer or when a boring repetitive job robs a worker of any sense of control or satisfaction.

On to this anxiety is grafted an increasingly amorphous fear of the future. For many of us, it began on 9/11 as we sat transfixed by constantly repeated newsreels of planes crashing into the Twin Towers and sensed life would never be the same. The absurd nomenclature of "the war on terror" and Blair's insistence that "the rules of the game have changed", simply reinforced the message: be afraid, be very afraid, the very antithesis of FDR's empowering reassurance.

The next big milestone on the road to a fearful society was probably the fourth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007, which effectively ended the debate over the science of climate change and declared a free market in increasingly apocalyptic scenarios.

At least climate change and terrorism present a real threat, even if our chances of dying as a result of either of them remain infinitesimally small. What keeps us awake at night is the way these issues have been morphed with both our own personal fears about our jobs, health, and finances and what we could call the catastrophication of events. This is the tendency to portray any threat as a worst-case scenario. Several factors feed into this: rolling 24-hour news; the rise of the unmoderated, rumour-drenched blogosphere; politicians desperate for a good headline or soundbite. Newspapers are part of this. Invitations to panic have included the millennium bug (remember that?), avian flu, HIV/Aids and the "obesity epidemic". In a world where human beings are increasingly seen as the problem rather than the answer, uncertainty easily mutates into outright fear.

As sociology professor Frank Furedi puts it, politics has internalised the culture of fear: "British politics is dominated by debates about the fear of terror, the fear of food, the fear of asylum seekers, the fear of anti-social behaviour, fear over children, fear about health, fear for the environment, fear for our pensions." Eat your heart out FDR.

Well-meaning government efforts to tackle those fears have a tendency to backfire. For instance, as the MHF report points out, the installation of 4.2m CCTV cameras in Britain has made us feel more, not less, fearful about crime.

All of this fear has a worrying knock-on effect on children. Absurdly exaggerated fears of children being snatched by strangers lead us to prevent us letting them play out of doors or walk to school. Instead they become fat, bored, lonely and anxious at home, caught in the downdraught of helicopter parenting. Even my comparatively free-range children worry far more than I ever did. At seven my son told me he wished he was five again "so I wouldn't have to worry about global warming".

I can hear you saying it: "Thanks Anne. We're already worrying about al Qaeda, melting ice caps and the global economy. Now we're worrying about worrying as well."

There are rays of light. Improvements in primary education have made our children more emotionally literate than we were. Belatedly, mental health is getting the focus it merits from politicians. A well-thought-out strategy aimed at the wider community, Towards a Mentally Flourishing Scotland, is due out shortly. Whether health boards and local authorities can afford to implement it is another matter.

Mental health services for under-18s are finally being brought within the government's 18-week treatment target.

The big "but" is that while England is pouring £173m into vastly expanding the availability of talking therapies, in Scotland the focus is on depression (basically, getting people off anti-depressants) rather than tackling this general sense of anxiety that infects so many of our lives. And it's all being done within existing budgets. While millions go on preventing cancer and heart disease, about 0.1% is spent on maintaining good mental health. We need to do better than this. We can't stop worrying but both individually and as a society, we can stop fear paralysing us, preventing us from prioritising our problems logically and distracting us from taking action to tackle them.