Excellent post by Ryan Holiday on the mechanics of fear (read the whole thing).

Once as Pericles shoved off a 150 ships in the Peloponnesian War, the sun was eclipsed and his men were thrown into fear. To prevent their paralyzation, he walked up to a lead steersman, removed his cloak and held it up around the man's face. He asked if he felt particularly afraid of this and of course the response was no. So what does he matter, he said, when the cause of the darkness differs? You read this and you smile. The Greeks were so clever. Or, like Von Clausewitz, you dismiss it as self-serving translation - a way to use history to say something obvious. But that very much belies the incredible implications of the idea. Beneath the quaint leadership-in-action anecdote is the fundamental notion that girds not just Stoic philosophy but cognitive psychology. It's the idea that if you can break apart something, it loses its power over you. In cog psych, only when you're aware of a bias or conditioned response can you circumvent it.

It's the same with the current crisis. We're stuck and can't see a way through the crisis given our conditioned responses. The crisis is way, way bigger than we are.

So, it's little wonder that we are fearful. Of course, if you break down the crisis, the entire situation becomes manageable. Fix what you can control. The local is the first place to start. Eliminate dependencies. Grow networks. Make the local productive.