I think what you are describing is a "survival response" or the initiation of the fight or flight reaction in humans. That's what people do when they believe they are in jeopardy of losing their lives or something very close to it.

Anxiety is a continuum of feelings from mild discomfort to severe panic to all the way to the survival response. But what sometimes happens for people is that the brain and body's alarm system triggers too easily (with repeated trauma), like the metal detector at an airport triggers for the metal in a wedding ring as if it were a gun. So the task for people becomes figuring out how to distinguish between a mild discomfort and a truly life threatening situation and everything in between. You wouldn't ever want to mess with your ability to detect life-threatening danger (although, because this is built into the body, not the brain, you probably wouldn't be able to. Anxiety itself offers a variety of messages and things to be learned from experiencing it. I don't think anxiety is as uniform as you are portraying it, although perhaps that is how it is for you now. Even if that's the case, I think it would be beneficial for you to unpack the complexities of anxiety and its full range of emotional expression, rather than seeing it in such an all-or-nothing way.

Anne