Stress vs Anxiety - What’s the Difference & How to Manage Both
Stress and anxiety… two seemingly interchangeable descriptions you might use when you’re feeling a certain type of pressure, tension, or unease in response to something in your life. Although there are some commonalities between stress and anxiety, like certain physical symptoms, there are some pretty notable differences in what causes them to occur. Differentiating between the two can help us learn what we need to cope, and how therapy can help, when either pop up in our lives.
What is Stress?
Stress is an emotional response that is typically triggered by an external cause, that will go away when the external cause ends. If you’ve ever had an important deadline coming up at work and found yourself having trouble sleeping, irritation and anger, digestive issues, muscle tension, and/or your heartrate and breathing getting faster, followed by relief of these symptoms once you met the deadline - you probably have experienced stress. Another example could be feeling stressed before having an important conversation with your partner, and once the conversation is over feeling relief from those symptoms. These symptoms are all signs of our biological “fight, flight, freeze or fawn” system activating to demands or “threats” placed on us. Most of our stressors may not be life or death threats like our ancestors faced, but our body still responds the same in order to prepare us.
Can Stress be Good?
A small amount of stress can actually be good for you. Before you reach the point of experiencing the discomfort of the symptoms listed above, stress can be motivating. Our bodies are hormonally prepping to act, and if you can cope with stress in a healthy way, you may find that you’re able to make progress and achieve your goals by using that momentum. The key is knowing how to manage stress before it gets to be too much and our level of functioning drops off.
Coping with Stressors
Nowadays normal stressors in our life may involve the aforementioned work, school, family, finances, life transitions, relationships & friendships, and so on. Although it’s normal to experience stress as a response to demands you might face, you may be looking for ways to decrease stress if it is affecting you often or in many areas of life. Here are some ways to cope with stress:
Self-care - identify what you like to do or what is good for you and sprinkle them throughout your week.
Balance - set boundaries that allow you to take time away from stressors
Healthy Lifestyle - adopt a healthy pattern of eating, exercise, and limit substances that can exacerbate stress
Set Achievable Goals - break stressors down into steps that are doable, rather than overwhelming
Reach out to a therapist - if you find it difficult to apply these strategies, stress has become unmanageable, or disproportionate to the trigger, reach out to me! I have a lot of experience working with clients to manage stress related to my specialties and would be happy to help you do so, too!
What is Anxiety?
Now that we can identify what stress looks like, what causes it, and how to cope, lets turn our attention to anxiety. Anxiety is similar experience, but instead of a response to a real or perceived threat, it’s the anticipation of a threat that may or may not be present. Anxiety can look like persistent worry and dread about what could happen, apprehension or hypervigilance of a non-threatening situation, and uneasiness that does not subside even with the conclusion of a stressor. The physical and emotional results of anxiety can look very similar to stress: insomnia, fatigue, increased heart rate, muscle tension, irritability, and anger. Anxiety actually originates from our internal response to stress, and can be affected by genetics, life experiences, and brain chemistry.
Anxiety vs Anxiety Disorders
It’s not uncommon to experience short-term anxiety in response to stress in our lives. Maybe you find yourself worrying about what to do after graduation or what’s going on in your relationship. You may find that these worries hang around for a little bit of time, are appropriate for what you’re encountering, and don’t extend to other areas of your life. The difference between this anxiety and an anxiety disorder is the length and intensity of which we feel the effects, and the overall impairment on your life. If you start to find that the anxiety persists for months and starts to be excessive in nature, then you may fit some criteria for an anxiety disorder. Stay tuned for a blog post next month on the different types of anxiety disorders.
Coping With Anxiety
Coping with anxiety can look very similar to coping with stress. Self-care, boundaries, and healthy lifestyles can all be components to managing the presence of anxiety in your life. If the anxiety you’re dealing with feels unmanageable, reaching out to start therapy is a great option to learn more about the relationship you have with anxiety and ways to change up your thought processes so that anxiety won’t have as strong of an impact on your life.
If you have questions about getting started, check out the FAQs, the blog How to Get Started in Counseling, or contact me for a free consultation!
Tina Leboffe, MA, LPC, NCC, AAC
*Please note that this blog is for your information only and does not constitute clinical advice or establish a client-counselor relationship.