"Stress Vs Anxiety: How to Tell the Difference and Get Help?"

Most people experience stress and anxiety at some point in their lives. Depending on the degree of intensity, they can deleteriously impact one's way of life. Although stress and anxiety share many similar physical and emotional symptoms – uneasiness, tension, severe headaches, high blood pressure, fatigue, and insomnia usually originate for different reasons. Therefore, it's important to determine which of the mental health issues you are experiencing to find an effective treatment plan and ensure a better quality of life for yourself.

What is Stress?

Stress is usually a response to an external cause, such as piled up work at the office or an argument with a friend, that subsides once the problem has been resolved. This is how stress is different from anxiety - it is dependent on the stressor; once the underlying stressor is relieved, stress can also be seen to disappear. You can relate it to fight-or-flight response where our adrenal glands pump out enough hormones that can prepare our bodies to face any perceived threat in the environment. At this point, you can find your heart pounding faster, muscles tensing up and breaths getting heavier. Although these symptoms may not be very harmful, prolonged stress can harm your psychological and physiological well-being. If your body is frequently succumbing to such hyperdrives, you may have to deal with severe headaches, gastrointestinal problems, muscle pain, and even cardiovascular diseases. Stress can also affect your sleeping and eating patterns, focus, and productivity levels. If you are experiencing chronic stress, there are plenty of ways to manage and reduce it - physical activity, adequate sleep, and breathing exercises are great ways to help to alleviate stress.

What are the Available Treatments?

For Stress

Learning to cope with stress is all about trial and error, i.e., what works for others may not work for you. Here is a list of tools that can help you combat stress.

1. Mindfulness Meditation Skills

Mindfulness meditation skills imply being fully aware of the present. These skills require you to learn to observe, describe, and experience the events of thoughts, sensations, emotions, and things happening externally in the environment, with a nonjudgmental stance. They help people interpret and regulate emotional vulnerabilities, thereby introspecting and reciprocating more responsibly. Take a walk in the park or watch the sunrise to reconnect with the natural world again.

2. Diaphragmatic breathing

It is the process of taking deep breaths to control the heartbeat rate and lower stress efficiently. Focus on each breath of yours, and experience the feeling of every moment attentively - sound, temperature, scent, and physical sensations.

Begin to access your distress thoughts and allow them to exist without judging or attributing negativity to it. The result may evoke strong emotional reactions, but an attempt to explore it will ascribe confidence to address and resolve inner challenges.

3. Listen to Music

Listening to slow relaxing music can ease your mind, decrease your stress response, and increase your focus level.

For Anxiety

The two main treatments for anxiety are psychotherapy and medication, and at times, people may even benefit from both of them. However, it's important that you seek help from a trained professional before choosing either of the two.

1. Psychotherapy

Talk therapy is beneficial in helping people recognize, analyze, and cope with their triggers of anxiety. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is a highly effective, short-term treatment that helps people learn to adapt skills to target their specific triggers and combat anxiety for a healthy life.

"Stress Vs Anxiety: How to Tell the Difference and Get Help?"

What is Stress?

What is Anxiety?

What are the Symptoms of Stress?

What are the Symptoms of Anxiety?