In the past I have written on the topic of desire and how our cultivation of it shapes our entire view of self, other and the expression of our will. Here’s a thought: Is anxiety anything more than the will responding to the perception of a desired object just out of reach, something that appears graspable but just beyond the fingertips of control? We want something and so our focus is on protecting it, grasping it, maintaining it, gaining it (coupled with the deep concern that if we do not maintain our vigilance, we will not be able to fulfill that desire).
Yesterday, Diane Langberg sent me this quote of one of her favorite dead theologians, John MacDuff, that illustrates how life orbits around central desires:
There is a gravitation in the moral as in the physical world. When love to God is habitually in the ascendant or occupying place of the will, it gathers round it all the other desires of the soul as satellites, and whirls them along with it in its orbit round the center of attraction [the core desire].
Quotation used by John MacDuff from Hewitson’s Life as found in The Mind of Jesus, p. 62. For a link to full texts of some of MacDuff’s devotional work, see here.
Musings on Faith and Psychology 
Another good article on anxiety is at http://www.ccesonline.com/whatdoyouknowaboutanxiety.htm