How to Tell the Difference Between Stress and Anxiety

In my role as a therapist specializing in anxiety disorders, I spend a lot of time helping my clients better understand their anxiety so it can work FOR them instead of against them.

The brain is designed to scan for threats because its focus is on survival.  It is constantly looking around to assess the situation for safety; that is what it was created to do!  This is an amazing function that our brains do automatically. It then decides if it needs to notify our body if it needs to respond to a real threat.  This happens for anxiety and stress, but the difference is that with anxiety, the alarm doesn’t turn off.  While anxiety and stress are protective in nature, stress responds to real and present demands, and anxiety responds to perceived threats and uncertainty.  

Below is a visual to help you differentiate between the two.  

If you are still unsure if you have anxiety or stress, ask yourself these questions:

“When the anxiety-inducing situation ends, does my mind and body eventually settle?”

“Do my thoughts quiet down without effort?”

“Does my anxiety rise in proportion to what is happening?”

If you answer yes to these questions, it could likely be situational stress.  If you ask yourself the questions below and answer yes to most of them, it’s more likely that you have anxiety. 

“Does my body stay tense, and I feel on edge, even when things are ok?”

“Do my thoughts continue to loop about things I’m concerned about, and it’s hard to get relief?”

“Is asking ‘what if’ something I do often?

Do you find yourself ruminating over situations, long after they are over?

Even if you answered yes to all the anxiety-related questions, you are going to be ok!  Sure, it doesn’t feel great, but when you can understand the function of your anxiety, you are able to better attack it, rather than feeling ashamed by it. 

See, anxiety and stress use the same parts of the brain, but when you have clinical anxiety, the brain doesn’t have an off switch.  For anxiety, the brain’s threat scanning system doesn’t respond to real threats but also to what could threaten it in the future.  The fear circuit in your brain (the amygdala) becomes super sensitive and mistakenly flags every situation as threatening. Then the prefrontal cortex, the reasoning part of our brain, has a harder time trying to logic our way out of an anxiety loop. Stress hormones then respond, and the nervous system stays in a constant state of anticipation as it is constantly preparing (or over-preparing), scanning, and predicting negative outcomes. This activation in the brain has no real resolution, and the threat response alarm continues to override logic in the brain.  This is why I say to clients often that with anxiety, the brain always overestimates danger and underestimates their ability to prevent and problem solve.  You easily forget how you’ve survived hard and challenging situations in the past, since all you can focus on is listening to the overwhelming, fearful scripts that play on repeat in your mind. 

This is why telling someone who is anxious to calm down isn’t just unhelpful, it’s really frustrating because you are asking their brains to do the opposite of what it is telling them to do!  If you are reading this article and feel seen as I describe anxiety, I want you to know that there is so much hope!  As someone who had anxiety since a young age, I love helping people see that anxiety isn’t a character flaw or a crutch; it’s simply caused by a brain that is working a bit too hard trying to protect you.  And when you see anxiety through this lens, you realize that anxiety isn’t the enemy. It can actually be a superpower when you learn to regulate it!

If you are interested in learning more, we’d love to talk with you!  We start every first session with clinical assessments to get a clear picture of the intensity of your anxiety and spend every session after that teaching you tools and helping you feel stronger and able to use your anxiety as a superpower!  For more information, check out our website and send us an email so we can start helping you today!