Stress and Anxiety both are what we consider to be emotional responses, both can be adaptive and necessary but both also hold the potential to become harmful for us. Many at times, we might find ourselves feeling irritable, angry, annoyed, tense, losing our concentration and even find ourselves crying for no reason. All these feelings can be found in both stress and anxiety so how do you know if what you’re experiencing is stress or anxiety?
Stress occurs when we are responding to an immediate, external threat or problem. This could be a work deadline, fight with a friend, a hectic schedule, a short term illness and more. Whereas, anxiety is this ever present worry, apprehension and sometimes even dread; we feel even when the immediate threat has passed. Anxiety is when situations around us seem more threatening than they really are.
Stress lives with you till the stressful situation has been resolved but anxiety is that unwelcome and long staying guest; that refuses to pass even when all the worries have left the party.
Stress and anxiety in mild forms can help us as they move us into action, overcome challenges, often even motivate us to get things done. But in extreme forms can cause similar kind of damage. In mild cases, both stress and anxiety can be treated by changes in lifestyle, reaching out to others for help, taking breaks and organising our work better. But when these steps stop working, it is a hint that stress/anxiety are increasing to levels outside our window of coping.
So what does one do?
The first step is to identify what is happening, are you concerned about only a particular situation that has newly cropped up in your life or has this worry been a long loyal friend of yours?
To give you an example, stress would be when you are irritable, annoyed and unable to focus because you’ve had a fight with your best friend you both are unable to solve or you have a ton of work to figure out and submit before the weekend. But you know once you just get through it, things will be back to usual.
Whereas, anxiety would look like regular worrisome thoughts about your friendship, whether your best friend really likes you and can often even snowball into your relationships in general where we start doubting other friendships when they weren’t even a problem to begin with. Similarly, on the work front, anxiety might look like worrying about your capability for work in response to a feedback by your manager, or you might be worried about how your boss perceives you, you might find yourself dreading meetings or work conversations and have an urge to avoid them and in extreme forms, you might have panic attacks before a work week begins.
Stress will colour only a particular situation as worrying for you whereas, anxiety makes all similar situations seem threatening to you. Stress is specific and short lived, anxiety can be persistent and pervasive.
The next step is to take some time to make these distinctions. Many at times you won’t know if you were just stressed or anxious till that situation passes but the moment you do, it is always helpful to reach out to a mental health professional for some guidance.
Therapy can be useful in both cases, the only difference is, stress might take a shorter duration to manage than anxiety and that’s completely okay. Stress is more external and the therapy work here usually involves developing and practicing strategies with the therapist, to deal with that specific stress.
Anxiety, on the other hand is much more internal and therapy work here involves understanding what is causing our anxiety, our triggers and how anxiety makes us distort the world around us to make it seem more threatening than it actually might be. And then, we move onto creating our own adaptive ways of managing this anxiety.
Take it step by step, identify if what you're experiencing is stress or anxiety or even both. And if you feel you've experienced both and continue to do so, then working on the anxiety will help relieve a lot of the stress. The next step is to understand where this stress is coming from, when it comes to anxiety it is advisable to seek professional help as well. So reach out to a mental health professional to find out for sure if what you’re dealing with is stress or anxiety; and help them help you come up with ways to deal with it.
For more mental health resources, read here for anxiety and relationships.
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