Hard to answer this comprehensively. Let's focus on how much the slave trade at its height (18th C) affected the lives of individuals who were not enslaved. Let's also focus on the region south of the northern savannas--forests, coasts and major river valleys (Senegal, Gambia, Volta, Niger).

I think the answer has to be, "Usually it was a major concern and has to have made life feel psychologically and materially precarious for many individuals". Smaller communities in many areas had to be ready at any moment to flee or fight against raids. There are communities that moved into infertile, hostile or remote locations simply to hide from raiders; there are several examples of communities that built out over lakes and lived over water so as to make it hard for raiders to surprise them and easier to escape to the far shore if raiders were surprised.

In some communities, existing systems of justice were being steadily perverted by the slave trade. E.g., crimes or misdeeds that would have required you to pay some kind of fine or recompense to a person you had harmed or stolen from were sometimes shifted to be offenses for which you could be 'justly' enslaved. Any society where justice and punishment are being badly distorted for some reason is a society where no one feels safe or comfortable.

In trading ports and larger towns/cities, the volatility of the slave trade, even in cities that were relatively distant from it or protected from it, like Benin or Kumasi, meant that economic, social and political life felt unstable, dangerous, prone to sudden change. Again, losing a political struggle, or being out-competed by a rival, might lead to being enslaved. Even if not, the fortunes of your household and kin could change very quickly--sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. The rules of political and social life were constantly rewritten at all scales.

Even people involved in slave trading had a lot to fear. Randy Sparks' book The Two Princes of Calabar has a particularly good example--the titular individuals were powerful within a "canoe house" (basically a slave-trading merchant company that used fictive kinship as its organizational system) but they were sold out by a rival and betrayed in the middle of a feast on board a slaving ship. Ordinary people in smaller communities sometimes faced the agonizing dilemma of needing to sell a few members of the community in order to acquire guns or resources necessary to defend the rest of the community from raids.

The regions of West Africa most affected by the slave trade in the 18th Century were not a random, Hobbsean anarchic nightmare. But life was definitely precarious for almost every community and every individual, and the psychological costs of that for many people have to have been profound, whether they had a fear of being enslaved or were trying to stay in control of systems involved in enslavement.

All of this said, life also went on. As it does now in places all over the planet that are in the midst of civil wars, environmental crises, or under crushing tyranny. Human beings are both fragile and resilient in some unpredictable and counter-intuitive ways. People still have sex, drink and feast, chat with neighbors, attend religious ceremonies, make meaning and art, and do everything else that makes us human even in the most dangerous and dire of circumstances. Farmers still plant and harvest; herders still take their animals from field to field. Atlantic Africa in the 18th Century was no different: the precariousness of life also fueled creativity, it drove people to seek new kinds of spiritual meaning (or to reinvigorate and reinterpret older religions), it brought new ideas and new material objects into everyday life, etc. So we shouldn't imagine that people spent their days 24/7 in fear, curled up in a fetal ball. But I think you could reasonably say that life went on under the shadow of great fear and sadness in many, many communities.