How much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened”

Anxiety is another term that has become popularized in our everyday language and while I think it’s great to normalize and help de-stigmatize mental health in our communities, I also believe it would be helpful to unpack the term, “anxiety’ and how it differs from stress. Anxiety is a future-focused emotion in that we experience a sense of nervousness about something that may happen in the future. Many, if not most people experience a feeling of anxiety at one time or another because it serves an important function by both alerting us to a situation where there is a risk of danger and telling us when something is important or meaningful to us. 

For example, most of us experience anxiety within the context of school or work, not because the situations themselves are dangerous but because they have a significant amount of personal meaning to them. Feelings of anxiety may cross the line into an anxiety disorder when the anxiety you are experiencing is out of proportion to what you might expect given the situation, it starts interfering with your daily functioning, and/or you start engaging in unhealthy behaviors in an attempt to avoid or alleviate your feeling of anxiety. 

The most common anxiety disorders include phobias, social anxiety disorder, panic disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, and post traumatic stress disorder. While closely related and often used interchangeably, stress differs from anxiety in that stress more broadly refers to our bodies response to a situation that requires us to adapt to our environment in some way. Essentially, we all have a limited number of mental and physical energy available at any given time and the more situations we encounter that use up our resources, the more stressed we will feel. Whether you are experiencing stress or anxiety, the bottom line is therapy can help and while it may not be realistic to strive for a life without either, we can develop ways of managing such emotions better and experiencing less disruption to the things that matter most to you.