Lori Streator breaks down stress versus anxiety: stress is a temporary response to external demands that fades when the problem goes away, while anxiety lingers internally even after the threat is gone. Both cause fatigue, sleep problems, and trouble concentrating. Sleep, diet, movement, and coping skills help; see a clinician if symptoms persist and interfere with daily life.
Chapters
SA is a busy thing. We all lead lives that involve so many moving parts at any given time. If it's not one thing, it's going to be another. But a lot of times we mistake stress for anxiety and anxiety for stress. So I want to break down the difference between stress and anxiety. Because what you might be experiencing might just be the result of something happening in your life that might not be anxiety or something might be ongoing and you might be experiencing more anxiety, but you might be attributing it to stress. So we're gonna break it down. I could venture a guess that everybody at some point in their life has dealt with stress. We all have a lot going on. I could also maybe guarantee that everyone has experienced stress, some level or range of anxiety at some point in their life as well. Stress is the response of a circumstance or a situation. Anxiety is more of the internal response to that stress. So let's just break it down a little bit so that you can understand the difference between stress and anxiety and understand where your body and your brain is coming from in response to, to life. When we talk about stress, when we define stress, stress is a quote unquote normal response of something happening. It's our response of a threat in our lives, something stressing us out, something causing us some kind of essentially pain or anticipation or something like that. So an external stressor like financial difficulties or, or a problem in a relationship or pressure at work, some kind of external circumstance or situation or something we're perceiving as a threat, we respond with stress. It can impact how you're thinking, how you're functioning emotionally and mentally, but also physically. Stress can do a lot to the physical body, like I said, cause fatigue, stomach problems, sleep disturbances, all kinds of responses to, to that external thing that's happening in your life. But it's normal. We've all, like I said, experienced some level of stress at some point in our lives. Some people deal with stress a lot better than others, and some people have a really hard time coping and managing even with just the simple daily stressors of life. So there's a wide range of what it could possibly do essentially to you. But your response to a threat or a situation, your levels of stress can absolutely be impacted positively when you learn how to cope or you are taught skills by a professional or things like that. So learning how to cope with life and how to cope with stress is really important in tempering your body and your mind's response to life and the external circumstances and situations that we come in contact with on a daily basis or even the bigger off that happens with a little less frequency. Now, anxiety is also a quote unquote normal response. Your brain is designed to keep you alive. It's a literal job, is to keep you functioning, keep your blood flowing, keep your heart pumping, keep your body working. So when it perceives a threat, it sends off signals and triggers to your body to do things like get your heart going faster or get your blood pumping faster or whatever the responses are so that it can make sure that you stay alive. When it perceives a threat, its job is survival. But the issue with anxiety is that while this response is normal, when the stressor goes away, the anxiety doesn't. And this is the difference between stress and anxiety. When a stressor, when a circumstance or a situation subsides or goes away or disappears or we tend to feel better, we go back to our normal level of functioning and life returns to normal. When anxiety is an issue we're talking about when those things in our lives subside or they go away, the anxiety doesn't. The persistent worry and fear and overwhelm is still there and very prevalent even when that external circumstance is, is gone or long gone. So stress can be short or long term. Anxiety tends to be a little more long term because we're talking when the thing, when the stressor, when the threat, when whatever is happening goes away or gets better, the anxiety is still there. It's still causing a problem in your life, in your ability to function. It's causing physical symptoms and like fatigue and concentration issues, sleep disturbances, digestive troubles. And it's also causing maybe some things emotionally and mentally that again, when the thing goes away, that those feelings that your response doesn't, that it's just kind of still there and you're left with feelings of fear and overwhelm and anxiety and all of the things that go with anxiety, you're left with all of those feelings. And even when life starts to look a little better, there's absolutely a fine line between stress and anxiety. But stress is more of the response to an external situation that tends to go away or we feel better when the situation calms down, anxiety, we tend to continue to feel out of control. And it becomes really problematic when, when life changes or quote, unquote gets better and we're still having a hard time functioning in our daily lives or we're being impacted by those emotions, the fear, the anxiety, the worry, the overwhelm, everything that goes in with the anxiety, all of the symptoms, you're still being impacted by all of that, even when life has started to shift. So it's a fine line. We do treat it similarly. I want people to pay attention to how they're sleeping and how they're eating, if they're moving their body, things they're reading and watching and listening to. Those are all basic things that I start with when I'm working with somebody. Whether it is about stress or anxiety, but knowing if it's more long term, if it's more chronic, if things have changed in their life but the feelings are still there, that's going to impact more of the longer term treatment. And if we're actually treating anxiety and what kind of coping skills somebody needs versus just dealing with a stressor in their life and how to kind of get them through to the other side so they can go back to a baseline level of functioning.
