Worry, stress, and anxiety

Worry, stress, and anxiety are different emotions and have different effects on your body. Worry happens in your mind; stress happens in your body; anxiety happens in your mind and body.

Worry is your mind dwelling on negative thoughts, uncertain outcomes, or things that could go wrong—inability to pay the mortgage, failing a test, and so forth. It’s a way for our brains to keep us safe. Unpleasant as it is, worry stimulates our brains to take action or solve problems. However, worry is only helpful if it leads to change. It stops being functional when it leads to obsessive thoughts. If you’re stuck on obsessive thoughts, research has shown that writing down your concerns helps to calm the brain.

Stress is a physiological response to a stressor, such as a work deadline or scary medical test. It’s your body reacting to a changed situation. In prehistoric times it was a useful response to a threat, such as a nearby predator. It releases adrenaline and cortisol to help our brains and bodies deal with a threat. Today it stimulates the same behavioral response, but if the stress becomes chronic, your body stays in this fight-or-flight mode continuously, making you more prone to health problems, such as digestive issues, heart disease, and a weakening of the immune system. Research shows that exercise is a good antidote to stress, as is focusing your energy on what you can control and accepting what you can’t.

Anxiety is a sort of combination of worry and stress: its cognitive element is worry and its physiological response is like stress, but in the absence of a specific stressor. Basically, anxiety is what happens when you’re dealing with a lot of worry and a lot of stress, such as financial concerns, or relationship issues. Feeling anxious is normal, but an anxiety disorder is different. It’s a serious medical condition affecting 40 million people in the US. For normal anxiety, research has shown that wiggling your toes breaks you out of your anxiety loop.

I’m fortunate in not being particularly prone to feeling stressed or worried, even in the face of the coronavirus. Of course, like everyone else, I worry about this or that, such as whether our cat will pee on our bed tomorrow morning, something she does from time to time.

For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.