Stress vs. Anxiety: What’s the Difference?
It’s common to hear people use the words stress and anxiety interchangeably. While stress and anxiety can feel very similar, they are not quite the same thing. Understanding the difference can help us better understand what we’re experiencing and determine what kind of support might be helpful.
What Is Stress?
Stress is our body’s response to a challenge, demand, or pressure. And most often, it has a clear source. You can trace the stress back to an event or situation. For example, a huge project at work with an upcoming deadline. Or a month where you maxed out all of your credit cards, and you still need that oil change. Stress can also be related to ongoing situations, like caregiving for an aging parent, or a consistently challenging financial situation.
Stress isn’t all bad. Stress can actually be helpful in small doses. It can motivate us to prepare for a presentation, study for an exam, or respond quickly during an emergency. The key characteristic of stress is that it is usually tied to something specific. When the stressor is resolved, our stress level often decreases as well. Another way to say this is that stress is usually time-limited. As the stressor resolves, stress levels often decrease as well.
What Is Anxiety?
Anxiety can certainly be triggered by stressful situations, but it tends to linger beyond the situation itself. While stress often says, “There is a problem right now,” anxiety says, “What if there’s a problem tomorrow?”
Anxiety is future-focused. It involves anticipating potential threats, risks, or negative outcomes, even when they haven’t happened. Someone experiencing anxiety may find themselves constantly worrying about situations they cannot predict or control, and it’s tied to a broader concept, not a specific situation. For example, anxiety might cause someone to constantly feel like they are going to fail on different levels; fail as a parent, fail as a spouse, fail at their job, etc. Instead of tying the worry to a specific situation, like a fight with a friend, anxiety has us ruminating on a never-ending list of questions, like “what if something bad happens,” or “what if someone is upset with me (insert many names/relationships here),” or “what if that was the wrong decision?”
Unlike stress, anxiety may continue even after the original problem has been resolved.
Why Do They Feel So Similar?
Both stress and anxiety activate the body’s alarm system. When our brain detects a threat, whether it’s an actual danger or simply the possibility of one, it signals the nervous system to prepare for action.
Once that alarm system has been activated, our body often responds with physical symptoms such as:
- Increased heart rate
- Muscle tension
- Difficulty sleeping
- Irritability
- Trouble concentrating
- Stomach discomfort
- Feeling restless or on edge
Because the physical symptoms overlap so much, it can be difficult to tell whether you’re experiencing stress, anxiety, or a combination of both.
A Helpful Question to Ask Yourself
If you are trying to determine whether you’re experiencing stress or anxiety, ask yourself “What am I responding to right now? What particular thing am I worried about?” If you can identify a specific challenge or demand in front of you, stress may be the primary factor.
But, if your mind is spending most of its time focused on future possibilities, worst-case scenarios, or things that might happen, anxiety may be playing a larger role.
Of course, life is rarely that simple. Many people experience both at the same time. A stressful situation can trigger anxiety, and anxiety can make stressful situations feel even more overwhelming.
When Stress Becomes Chronic
One of the challenges in life is that many of us never fully exit “stress mode.” Our schedules are packed. Our phones keep us connected to work long after business hours have ended. News, notifications, responsibilities, unending to-do-lists, and expectations follow us everywhere.
Over time, chronic stress can keep our nervous system activated for longer than it was designed to be. When that happens, people often begin to notice symptoms such as exhaustion, irritability, difficulty sleeping, trouble focusing, and feeling emotionally depleted.
It’s a bit like driving a car. If you’re taking a quick drive or even a one-day extended road trip, it might be tiring, but it feels manageable. But, if you’re driving all day, every day, with your foot slammed down on the gas pedal, eventually, the engine starts to wear down. There will be longer-term consequences on your body, your mood, and your thinking.
When Anxiety Becomes More Than Occasional Worry
Everyone experiences anxiety from time to time. It’s a normal human emotion. And in small doses, it actually serves us well. For example, feeling anxious about an upcoming exam encourages us to study. Having work-related anxiety around a presentation typically motivates us to work hard to prepare well.
However, anxiety may deserve closer attention when it begins to interfere with daily life. Especially if you notice you are worried about multiple things, people, or areas in your life. You may notice that anxiety is affecting your relationships, work performance, decision-making, sleep, or ability to enjoy activities you once found meaningful. You might find yourself avoiding situations, seeking constant reassurance, overthinking every decision, or feeling unable to relax even when things are going well. If you are noticing some of these signs, it might be time to reach out for help.
Understanding Your Nervous System
One of the most important things to remember is that neither stress nor anxiety means something is wrong with you. Your nervous system is designed to protect you. The challenge is that sometimes that protective system becomes overworked. It can begin responding to deadlines, emails, social situations, or future uncertainties with the same urgency it would use for genuine danger. There’s a term for this- threat perception. When anxiety increases, your body begins to assess normal stresses as a real danger or threat, and your body responds accordingly. This cycle can be exhausting.
The goal isn’t to eliminate stress or anxiety completely. Neither is realistic. Instead, the goal is to better understand what your mind and body are communicating, develop healthy ways to respond, and learn how to return to a sense of balance when life becomes overwhelming.
At Aspire Counseling, we help our clients delve deeper into the root cause of our anxious thinking, and we approach it from two different angles. The first angle is to learn skills and techniques that you can use immediately to manage and control the anxiety. The goal is to decrease the negative effects anxiety is having on your day-to-day tasks and interactions. The second angle is to dig deeper and try to understand where the anxiety is coming from. By addressing the underlying cause, we hope to significantly decrease the amount of anxiety that you have in the future. And help you to recognize it (when it does show up) for what it is- a worry that is not productive or helpful. Then you can circle back and use the skills learned to help manage it before it gets a hold of you.
If you are ready to tackle your anxiety and take control back for yourself, call us or message us today. Your mind and your nervous system will thank you.