Stress vs Anxiety

Almost nobody arrives able to say which they have. They say they are wound up, not coping, or unable to switch off, and want to know if that is stress or anxiety.

We are Richard and Helena Boyd. We have practised psychotherapy in Perth since 2005, and before that had whole careers in technology. Richard built an IT and business transformation consulting career here through his twenties and thirties. Helena was a software engineer for thirteen years in Ireland and Australia.

We mention it because we did not learn about chronic stress from a textbook. We learned it the way most of our clients do, from the inside, in industries that treat exhaustion as a personality trait. The distinction matters because the two respond to different things, and reducing your workload fixes one and barely touches the other.

The Short Answer

One question separates them. Is there something you can point at, and does the feeling stop when that thing stops?

If yes, you are experiencing stress. Stress is your body’s response to external pressures and it subsides when the pressure does. If the feeling persists after the pressure is gone, or arrives with no obvious trigger, that is closer to anxiety. Anxiety keeps running when nothing is happening, which is the most useful thing to know about it.

What Is Stress?

Stress is a normal response to demand, and in the right dose it is useful.

When you feel stressed the body shifts into fight or flight mode, stress hormones rise, and once the demand passes the system stands down. That is the design working.

The problem is ongoing pressure with no recovery. Long lasting stress means a response built for minutes runs for years, until it has reshaped your daily life without anyone noticing.

What Is Anxiety?

Anxiety is the same physiology without the external event.

Where stress points outwards at a demanding job or a major life change, anxiety points inwards. Feeling anxious shows up as persistent worry, excessive worries about things that have not happened, and a persistent sense that something is about to go wrong. Anxious thoughts loop because there is nothing to resolve them against.

Anxiety also carries an irrational fear component that stress does not. People know it is out of proportion and cannot stop it, which adds shame on top.

Key Differences Between Stress And Anxiety

Four things separate them.

The trigger. Stress has an identifiable initial trigger and external factors driving it. Anxiety often has no obvious trigger. The duration. Stress subsides when the stressful situation resolves. Unlike stress, anxiety can last months or years and escalates if left alone.

The content. Stress is about what is happening. Anxiety is about a perceived threat rather than an actual one.

The response to change. Fix the circumstances and stress lifts. Fix them and anxiety finds something new to attach to, which is when most people realise it was never about the job.

Symptoms Of Stress

Read these as things you have explained away.

• Muscle tension across the neck, jaw and shoulders
• Headaches, constipation and trouble sleeping
• Irritability, anger and general unhappiness
• Difficulty concentrating and forgetting things
• Feeling overwhelmed by an ordinary week
• Moodiness and less tolerance for people

Sustained, this affects mental and physical health together. Chronic stress is linked with high blood pressure, heart disease and a weakened immune system, so physical well being is part of the picture.

Most people recognise four or five and have a reason ready for each. That is not denial. It is what happens when a state lasts long enough to feel like personality.

Symptoms Of Anxiety

Anxiety symptoms overlap with stress and go further.

• Nervousness, tenseness and restlessness with no clear source
• A racing heart, sweating, trembling and shortness of breath
• Nausea or diarrhoea when nothing is wrong
• A sense of dread, sometimes called impending doom
• Heightened alertness, scanning, unable to relax
• Panic attacks, arriving suddenly and peaking within minutes

Panic attacks are the clearest dividing line, and stress rarely produces them. If you have had one, you know the difference between being under pressure and having your body decide you are dying.

Where They Overlap

Stress and anxiety share the same origin, which is why telling them apart is so difficult.

Both run on the fight or flight response and the physical symptoms are close to identical. The common symptoms of each include muscle tension, trouble sleeping and difficulty concentrating, the emotional symptoms overlap, and the two are closely connected rather than separate categories.

They feed each other in an anxiety stress cycle. Chronic stress is one of the recognised risk factors for an anxiety disorder, and both stress and anxiety occur together in plenty of the people we see.

The Perth Version Of This

Chronic stress has a local accent, and a few things come up constantly.

The resources cycle is the first. Perth runs on boom and quiet, and people carry a background hum about the next round of cuts even in good years. That is not a deadline you can finish, and open ended pressure is what converts into anxiety.

The second is distance. This is the most isolated capital city in the world, and many people here have parents and oldest friends five hours away by plane. When something goes wrong, the support that would absorb it is interstate.

The third is habit. The local instinct is to say you are fine and get on with it, which works until the day it does not.

When Stress Becomes An Anxiety Disorder

There is a threshold worth knowing.

Anxiety becomes a disorder when it is persistent, out of proportion and interfering with everyday life. The common ones are generalised anxiety disorder, panic disorder and social anxiety, with obsessive compulsive disorder and post traumatic stress disorder in related categories.

Only a psychologist, psychiatrist or GP can diagnose these. If anxiety has shaped your decisions for six months, it has stopped being a passing response to extreme stress.

How To Manage Each

The two need different work, which is why the distinction matters at all.

To manage stress, name your actual stress triggers, because stress management techniques applied to an unchanged workload are a holding pattern. Physical activity is the most reliable way to reduce stress, since it completes the cycle the body started. Sleep is second, and limiting caffeine after midday helps. Breathing exercises work in the moment, and deep breathing with a longer exhale than inhale tells your nervous system the emergency has passed.

Anxiety has no load to remove, so the aim is changing your relationship with anxious thoughts and building coping mechanisms. Our anxiety counselling uses cognitive work on threat interpretations, schema work where perfectionism drives it, and body based work on the physical alarm. The part most people miss is the body, because anxiety lives in a nervous system that has learned to stay alert.

What We See In The Body

Our approach is Integrative Body Mind Psychotherapy, built on the principle that the body is the subconscious mind, and this distinction is where it earns its place.

Here is the test we use in the first session. It is more reliable than any questionnaire.

We slow the room down. No agenda, no questions, just quiet for a minute. With stress, the breath drops. Shoulders come down, jaw releases, and the body takes the opportunity, because the pressure is external and not in the room. With anxiety none of that happens. The breath stays high in the chest and the bracing holds, because what is being braced against came in with them.

That shows up within ten minutes, usually before someone finishes explaining why they booked. It is why we work through Core Energetics and body based methods rather than talk alone. You can talk yourself out of a worry and still sit in a body that has not agreed. Our body mind psychotherapy works with both.

When To See A Mental Health Professional

Self help is reasonable until it is not working.

Speak to a GP or a mental health professional if symptoms have run beyond a few weeks, if you are avoiding things, if you have had panic attacks, or if a family member has said something. Do not wait for a threshold you can justify to someone else. Lifeline on 13 11 14 and Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636 run around the clock.

What This Looks Like In Practice

These are composite examples drawn from our clinical work, with identifying details changed.

A project manager in her thirties was certain she had anxiety. Mapped against her calendar, every episode sat inside a fourteen month period with an impossible workload. It was stress, it was severe, and it resolved two months after she changed roles.

A man in his forties left a job he called the source of everything. Six weeks into a calmer role the feeling was still there, attached to his health. Nothing external had caused it and nothing external was going to fix it.

A woman in her fifties had both, which is the most common presentation. The work was separating them, so she could act on what was changeable and treat the rest differently.

Frequently Asked Questions

The questions people ask us most often about this, and our honest answers.

Can Stress Turn Into Anxiety?

Yes. Prolonged stress is a recognised risk factor for anxiety disorders. The nervous system learns to stay switched on and stops needing a reason.

Can You Have Stress And Anxiety Together?

Very often, and it is the most common picture we see. They amplify each other, which is why treating one disappoints people.

How Do You Know If It Is Serious?

Look at function rather than intensity. If it is affecting your sleep, work or relationships, it is serious enough to act on.

Does Anxiety Ever Go Away Completely?

Anxiety is a normal human response, so the goal is proportion rather than removal. With the right support the intensity drops and episodes become rarer.

Where To Go From Here

Stress and anxiety look almost identical from the inside, and the test is simple. Stress has something to point at and eases when that changes. Anxiety keeps going without one.

Knowing which you have tells you where to put your effort. Stress needs the load reduced and recovery built back in. Anxiety needs work on a nervous system that has forgotten how to stand down. Most people we see need both.

If this describes your last few months, we work with stress and anxiety at our Inglewood rooms and online.