Lori Streator breaks down the difference: stress reacts to what's happening now, while anxiety lingers and spreads even after the trigger is gone. Anxiety interferes with sleep, work, and relationships. If symptoms persist or get worse, ask for professional help.
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What's going on? Welcome back to my channel. Stress and anxiety can often look pretty similar at times, depending on how you cope, your lifestyle, what's going on in your life, externally, internally, your relationships. Sometimes we mistake stress for anxiety and we mistake anxiety for stress. I want to give you three ways to help you determine and figure out if what you're experiencing physically and emotionally is stress or anxiety. Because if you can figure it out or you can go to a therapist and say, here are some things I'm experiencing, here's some things I've asked myself, then that therapist can help you in the best way possible. So here are three ways to figure out if what you're experiencing is is stress or if it's more anxiety. The first thing you need to figure out is if it's more external or internal. Stress is our response to external things like pressure at work, financial difficulties, issues in relationships. All of the things that happen in our lives impact us and we have a stress response. And depending on how you cope with things in general and is going to impact how you deal with general daily stressors and the bigger things that come up like losses, issues at work and things like that. So stress is our response and it tends to be more external, anxiety is more internal, it's more what is happening inside of us based on the stressor and the differentiating big factor here is if that stressor was gone, if it disappeared, what would you feel better? Usually with stress we tend to feel better and we can return to a baseline level of functioning of how we were before that thing, before that issue in the relationship or the pressure at work or the financial difficulties happened. But when we're talking about anxiety, we're talking about more of the persistent fear and overwhelm and anxious feelings that are still there when that external stressor goes away. So stress is more of a response to external stuff. Anxiety is more internal. The second way to determine if what you're experiencing is stress or anxiety is the idea that stress tends to be pretty manageable for people. We all experience a level of stress in our daily lives from the moment we wake up until the moment we go to bed and, and we can handle the things that our day throws at us. But when we talk about anxiety, we're talking about things that are maybe spiraling out of control that are really impacting our ability to function, our ability to sleep, have healthy relationships, concentrate at work, do all of the things that daily life requires of us. So anxiety, while it's manageable, it tends to have more of a significant impact on our life. And if left unidentified and untreated, that anxiety can spiral out of control and literally impact somebody's ability to function day to day. It impacts relationships, their ability to function at work, maybe they start to withdraw, they can't sleep, and those symptoms grow and grow and grow. And now the anxiety starts to possibly take over their life and really impact more areas than maybe it was initially impacting. So knowing the difference between stress and anxiety is really important. If it's anxiety and it is lingering, it's not going away. When those stressors are going away or you're really starting to struggle day to day, it's impacting relationships at work, all of the things in many areas of your life. It might be more anxiety than just a general stress response. And the third thing to think about, kind of like I've said, is that stress is our response to something that is happening, something that is happening in a relationship, something that's happening in your bank account or at work or with friends. Stress is our reaction to life, to things happening. But anxiety is more of the persistent fear and worry and dread of something that hasn't even happened or that might not happen, or that we've completely made up in our minds or that has happened and we can't get over. So stress is like that immediate response to things happening that are actually going on. Anxiety is very much created when we can't cope with what's going on or, or we're creating scenarios in our head that haven't even happened yet or that aren't even likely to happen. But our brain is just spiraling out of control with the fear and the overwhelm and the worry and this sense of dread that the anxiety is creating. So if you're apprehensive about something that might happen in the future, that tends to be a little more common. But if you're really struggling with something that's not even on the horizon, or something that you quote, unquote, shouldn't even worry about, you might be leaning more toward the anxious end of how you're thinking. And we're going to address that differently in therapy than if somebody is just dealing with something that's actually going on in their life and they need a few more coping skills to deal with what's happening. But when we're talking about anxiety and we're starting to create scenarios in our mind, and we're not just apprehensive about things coming up, and we have dread and worry about things that truly really aren't even on the horizon, we might be dealing more with anxiety than we are stress. As always, if you're thinking about something longer than you wish you were thinking about or something's bothering you, ask for help. It doesn't matter if it's stress or anxiety. It doesn't need to get really bad or impact your ability to function. For you to ask for help. I'd rather you err on the side of caution and learn some coping skills and get help before things essentially spiral out of control. But those are just three ways for you to figure out if what you're experiencing is more on a response response of what's going on in your life, if it's more external and stress related versus if it's more on the anxiety end of the spectrum. And that might determine how you get help and what we as therapists do to help you so that you can feel better and not dread things that aren't even on the horizon of your life. We don't want people worrying and living in this sense of dread and fear and, and overwhelm because of the scenarios that we can create in our minds. We want people to be able to handle stress and daily life and not have it impact how you're sleeping, your relationships, your work, your ability to concentrate. If you're struggling with stress, if you're struggling with anxiety or you're not sure, go through those three things. Ask yourself some questions, and then if it's still bothering you, get some professional help. Ask for help. Ask for guidance to figure out how you can move forward so that you feel more equipped to deal with daily life. And possibly when your brain starts creating scenarios that aren't likely to happen, because that's what anxiety does, it's really good about making up things in your mind and then you're worried about things that aren't even maybe going to happen. So let us as therapists help you. But those are just three ways that you can figure out if what you're experiencing is anxiety or stress and then you can go from there.
