I've recently (well, actually during my last mescaline journey) came to realise that in the last few years, i have become a more anxious person. When i was younger (i'm 39 now),i just used to live without holding back, without any fear. I would climb trees, swim very far offshore, travel the world without making any plans..i even did some skydiving and stuff. But last year, for the first time in my life, i actually experienced vertigo. I was Climbing a scaffold and halfway..i just got a dizzy kind of feeling and i suddenly noticed that i was afraid.

I don't know if it's normal to become a more anxious person when you get older. But i just feel that i somehow should loosen up a little. I'm a more uptight kind of person than i used to be, and i don't realy like that.
It's not realy terrible. I do get out, have fun and try new things every now and then. But it's just...sometimes i can't help thinking "what a dick have i become".

It is not about the amount of different triggers of fear we experience, it is about how we are dealing with them.

tseuq

You know what you need to do.

Don't be a dick. Simple. Change.

Perhaps the organ in your inner ear responsible for balance has just degraded a bit because of age, and you felt anxiety because this was new to you.

While we experience/(are) life, our mind is constantly conceptualizing its reality.

But what is it all good for? Our whole system is designed to adapt and maintain survival. Thus, your genetic survival program uses its whole perception and mind to continously analyze possible occuring dangers and it uses fear (a physiological arousal) as alarming system, which just tells us, "Watch out!". The appearance of fear doesn't simultaneously mean that our alarming system is always right and we are in real danger, like you can have a false alarm with your car alarming system. So, based on our previously formed concepts, our alarm is ringing, we check the trigger and can decide "Ah.. every ok" and can go on and if not flee or fight.

Good to have this alarming system and better have 5 false alarms than 1 missed.

In the last consequence, all contents of fear come down to the fear of death.

tseuq

Anxiety is our own biological response to a dangerous enviornment. As time goes by (although you're not an old man at all) this response could be more easily triggered by the fact that your own body is losing ability to react and adapt to more critical situations, also, your perception of what is and isn't safe is getting reformulated and unfortunately reprogrammed by exterior means - media invading our senses with violence, political statements reinforcing fear-based paradigms and what so not - all these things have a somewhat permanent effect on the human mind on a conscious and unconscious level.
So basically, try to understand what it is that could be having a major role in what you fear and rip it apart.
Some things that could help you: exercise, meditate, breathe correctly.. Find what suits you best.
Good luck!
Ps: As it was pointed out, it could actually be related to some issue in your eardrums, get them checked out!

This! Great explanation.

Looks like you need to book an adventuruous holiday or do some extreme sports like hang-gliding, bungy jumping/skydiving. It helps you to re-evaluate your fear. But generally I see that the older people become, the more reserved and scared they become. especially about trying new things. Of course there are a few who are an exception (wim hof), but I would say 90% of oldies turn frail and frightened.

Nice!

Another way of looking at it is that as you get older you become less stupid, less likely to take the risks that were taken before due to life experience, hard knocks, the development of a sense of responsibility in relation to any family that you may have accumulated and become more comfortable in your own skin, therefore being less competitive (and that includes competition with oneself).

Trying new things doesn't necesarily mean jumping off of high things with a just a bit of elastic attached to ones' self for security. There are also very fulfilling and interesting activities such as stamp collecting, advanced cake baking and playing sports such as darts, bowls, petanque and flyfishing.

To OP i would suggest embracing your new found sense of self preservation and become a philatelist.

Don't forget meditation! That hobby should be mandatory for people over 50 imo, let them reflect on their life until they can't think anymore and enter in to a blissful state, unfettered, not excessively thinking about negative scenarios...