I’m worried,

you’re worried,

we’re all worried!

In case you haven’t noticed, we’ve become a land of worried people.

Not that we didn’t have worries before the Great Recession of 2008-09. After all, we suffered through the Great Depression, which by all accounts was far, far worse.

We’ve worried our way through a mess of wars — WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam and we’re fighting two more right now.

We’ve suffered through assorted banking busts, real estate crashes and Wall Street bubbles.

Through it all, however, we have remained largely optimistic people over the past 60 years.

But this last recession has us shaken.

A Rockefeller Foundation report released Tuesday sums it up this way — “Standing on Shaky Ground: Americans’ Experience with Economic Insecurity.”

In other words, a lot of us are frightened by what we’ve seen and experienced.

The three biggest concerns identified in the report:

* A major loss of income.

* Fear of large out-of-pocket medical expenses.

* Loss of financial buffers standing between us and the first two worries.

The foundation report is based on something called the ESI, or Economic Security Index, which is the percentage of people who have experienced at least a 25 percent loss of “available household income” without an adequate financial safety net to make up the loss.

Basically, it’s a worry meter; the higher the number, the more worried we are.

In 1985, the national ESI stood at 12.2 percent. For 2009, it is estimated to top 20 percent.

That means one in five American families has had an actual loss of income or major medical expense of 25 percent or more of their family income.

And their losses have everyone else worried. The Rockefeller report found that 65 percent of us feel less secure, while only 19 percent feel more secure.

The report found that between March 2008 and September 2009, 93 percent of households “experienced at least one substantial decline in their wealth or earnings or substantial increase in nondiscretionary spending, most often for medical needs or assistance to family members,” according to the report.

Some say we have the finest health care system in the world, while others say it is far from it.

Either way, how good a system is it if most Americans fear an illness may impoverish their family?

We’re also worried about losing our homes. A remarkable 50 percent of Americans in the summer of 2009 said they feared losing the roof overhead.

Of equal concern is our feeling that our buffers against financial shocks — like equity in our homes, investments and savings — have diminished or evaporated.

Our response, according to other reports, has been exactly what you would expect in a time of insecurity: hunker down. We are paying off our debts, increasing our savings and delaying large purchases.

The past three years have been, in short, a blow to our collective feeling of optimism and security, which are, ironically, two of the ingredients we need for a robust economic recovery.

Yet, there are glimmers of hope. Private sector unemployment is falling. Consumer spending is up this holiday season, and the stock market has had back-to-back positive years.

But only time will tell whether Americans can regain the security they once felt.