Everyone Worries: Understand the difference between Anxiety & Everyday Worry

Everyone worries.

Believe me, everyone!

Feeling worry about things is a completely normal human response to worrying situations. It’s no different that feeling sad when something sad happens or happy when there’s something to be happy about. But it’s pretty common to hear people and media using the word anxiety almost interchangeably with worry.

It can be really hard to tell the difference between normal worry and anxiety that begins to move into a space where chatting with a counselor might be the right call. But how can I tell the difference between worry and anxiety?

Worry and anxiety share some common experiences or symptoms. In both cases, you might have racing thoughts. You might find it difficult to get a good night’s sleep. Or you might find yourself being abnormally tense or irritable.

Ultimately, a trusted professional is going to be able to help you differentiate between worry and anxiety but this post can help you determine if it’s time to make an appointment for more help.

What is Normal Worry?

First of all, let’s figure out what normal worry is. There are a couple of important attributes that are worth remembering.

Normal worry is usually a temporary, situation-specific response.

For example, you may be worried about something that happened on a single day. Maybe you get a call from your boss at a strange time of day and she just says that she’d like to see you in her office before the end of the day. You may feel worried in that situation, not knowing what she may want to see you about. Your thoughts might race through a number of scenarios. Did you mess up on an email to a client? Did you say something inappropriate to another staff member? You might think that you’re about to get laid off.

Or you might be worried about something that is a little longer term. Maybe you’ve overspent on your credit cards and now you’ have to adjust your budget over the next few months to try and get your debt under control. You might lose sleep worrying about unknown or unaccounted for expenses. You might get irritable when your spouse suggests going out to eat or spending additional money on items that you don’t really need.

Both of these scenarios describe situations of normal worry. It’s perfectly understandable to be worried about these situations. Even when you have a good plan or good understanding of the situation, you might still feel worry.

We can worry in a lot of situations but remember that worry typically comes and goes throughout the day (i.e. you can think about other things pretty easily without getting drawn back into the worrying situation), is usually associated with a clear situation, and doesn’t really get in the way of living your life.

So, What About Anxiety?

The major distinctions between anxiety (at least, clinical anxiety) and worry is that anxiety is persistent and is often overwhelming. Whereas worry might come and go as you’re thinking about various things throughout the day, anxiety lingers. It can stick around, causing your mind to race or your heart rate to elevate throughout the day even when you’re not actively thinking about a triggering situation.

Anxiety can also be much more intense than worry. In fact, it can often feel like an overreaction to relatively small situations. The intensity might even result in physiological responses like a panic attack.

Common signs of anxiety might include constant “what if” thinking, a host of possible physical symptoms (tight chest, gastrointestinal issues, headaches, etc), and difficulty concentrating or relaxing. You might even find yourself avoiding others or situations that you typically really enjoy.

Overcoming Anxiety

When it shows up, Anxiety can certainly impact your daily life. And that’s a key indicator that it might be time to reach out to a professional for additional support. In fact, if you can recognize the signs early on and get support when you notice them, it can really help the Anxiety from taking over.

First, it’s important to know that Anxiety is not a failing. It’s a physical response. We live in a world that already has a high baseline level for stress. When we find ourselves encountering stressful situations, we can overwhelm our mind’s built-in mechanisms for dealing with stress and it spills over and begins to take up the brain cycles that we often use for day-to-day situations.

Second, because it’s physiological in nature there are some important physiological solutions that can help. For example, there are tools like mindfulness, yoga, mindful breathing, grounding exercises, or physical activity that can all help build resiliency against anxiety.

And, of course, professionals can lead you through a number of techniques based in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), or other emotionally focused approaches to help sort through your triggers and thoughts that keep your anxiety active.

Final Thoughts

It might be difficult to think of Anxiety as being helpful but consider that what we call anxiety is essentially overactivity in the parts of our brain that keep us safe. By being aware of threats in our environment, our brain has helped humans survive countless generations. Anxiety is what happens we we move into a situation where our internal threat sensors are returning too many false positives when scanning for threats and makes us think that there are significant dangers in our environment when they’re not really there.

At Harris Counseling and Consulting, we can help you understand your anxiety and work on resetting these sensors so that you can get back to living the life you want to live. Reach out today to learn more about how we can help.

Photo Credit: Desmond Smith Photography