The Difference Between Anxiety and Stress

What is the difference between anxiety and stress?

I was running as fast as I could, heart pounding, fear gripping my seven-year old body as I sprinted a flight of stairs trailing my eleven-year old sister and eight year old neighbor who were much faster than I.

“I think I’m having a heart attack,” I yelled after my sister.
“C’mon!” she replied.

We had just been chased by an off-duty policeman who had stopped his car and hunted us down after we threw acorns in the street and hit his vehicle. The strange man’s big black boot rounding the corner of a neighbor’s back yard where we hid was terrifying. Instinctively, when we saw the boot we fled.

Anxiety and Stress: Fight, Flight, Freeze

The three of us (my sister, neighbor and I) were all in a state of fight, flight, freeze–the physical state one’s body can get thrown into when adrenaline and cortisol (the stress hormones) are released in the face of imminent threat. The reason I thought I was having a heart attack is because the policeman posed an external threat to me and my body reacted by releasing hormones to increase stamina and speed which resulted in heart pounding. The experience of an imminent external threat and the body’s physiological response is a good definition of stress.

Stress can be acute (like the above example) or chronic (if the threat never seems to go away, such as the threat of losing one’s job in an unstable economy.)

Does Anxiety Manifest Physically?

But what about anxiety? Doesn’t it also manifest physically? Contemplate the following:

A forty-eight year old man endures muscle tension on a daily basis. He also worries a lot. His worries jump from one vague negative thought to another and then another.

Will his son get in a car accident while driving to college?

Will his house be devastated by a fire?

Will he get cancer?

He can’t quite get a handle on whether any of these things will really happen or not because they are only rare possibilities his mind has glommed onto, resulting in chronic worry and ongoing tension.

He often can’t sleep at night, fearing that he’ll lose something–his son, his house, his life–even though there are no concrete threats to any of these things. Sometimes, if he thinks about it enough, his stomach feels queasy and his heart pounds.

He experiences these symptoms most of the time for months. This is anxiety. While it is related to stress in that it manifests as a result of perceived threat, it’s primary nature is that of worry of losing control of something or someone, including oneself.

Anxiety and Stress: How Anxiety Manifests

Anxiety can also manifest as a result of trapped energy or what someone is NOT doing that they should be doing. For example, if someone holds in her emotions about a break-up, telling herself that she doesn’t care that much, denying her sadness and heartbreak, this unexpressed emotion can manifest as anxiety.

In other words, trapped emotion can bounce around inside of us creating dis-ease, tension, or feeling on edge. We may not be conscious that the source of these symptoms is a repressed emotion, but once the emotion is identified and expressed, the anxiety symptoms can ebb. Once the woman acknowledges her sadness and allows herself to cry and mourn the lost relationship, her tension and jumpiness can cease.

Anxiety and Stress

Stress can be acute or chronic. Stress is related to a known stressor, such as a bear in the woods or an angry boss.

Anxiety is often related to the unknown (both one’s fear of it and what one is unaware of, like the emotion example.)

Both can produce physiological symptoms, but the symptoms of anxiety are usually milder than the symptoms of stress.

Conclusion

My sister, neighbor and I didn’t get caught by the black-booted cop so my “heart attack” symptoms went away pretty quickly. However, given the level of threat to my seven year old self, it is a memory that stays with my today.

Does it cause me anxiety now? Do I fear I’ll be arrested by police one day? No. I have no lingering worries about the incident. It was an acute stress episode and nothing more.

The forty-eight year-old man, however, suffers daily as he has trouble controlling his worried mind. The good news is he’s learning to calm his mind through meditation so the anxiety symptoms aren’t as pervasive.

One last word, panic is different from stress or anxiety and one that deserves its own post so stay tuned.

You might also be interested to read:

• Three Simple Three Ways to Decrease Stress in a World of Technology and Information Overload
• Nature as a Stress-Reliever
• Helping Kids be Resilient to Stress