What is anxiety and how is it different from stress? - Video transcript

Hey everyone, I'm Kristen, the anxiety therapist, and if you're looking for information and tips on coping with and managing anxiety, then you are in the right place. If you like what you hear, go ahead and subscribe to my channel, you can do that by clicking the little icon in the bottom right corner of the screen and hopefully you guys will will find this video helpful.

So today I'm going to be focusing on where anxiety actually stems from and the difference between stress and anxiety. So the amygdala is the part of our brain that is responsible for our fight flight or freeze response. Sometimes referred to as our reptilian brain and every animal that walks the face of the earth has an amygdala and it's responsible for keeping us safe.

Right. It's actually a very adaptive and functional part of our brain. However, with anxiety, sometimes our brains can't differentiate between an actual threat and a perceived threat. So let's say for example, you have a an animal that's being chased by a predator and their amygdala gets fired up and they need to figure out, okay, do I run away or do I hide in a bush? How do I keep myself safe so that I don't get eaten by this predator, since humans are much more complex and intellectual, sometimes we can't necessarily differentiate between that actual threat and a perceived threat. So let's say we're walking through a dark alley at night through the city and so we see someone approaching us, they seem a little suspicious.

It's our amygdala are anxiety, our fight flight freeze response that's going to keep us safe and alive. So we don't want to demonize it, right? We just need to figure out how it can work for us as opposed to against us. And when we have anxiety, it feels like it's working against us because it's constantly fired up.

The amygdala is just constantly working and can't really tell us like, oh no, you're in actual danger or know that you're just thinking about this situation as though it's a dangerous one. So, some of the symptoms that you might experience if you have anxiety could be just constant worry every day. You just kind of feel this sense of worry or nervousness or feeling kind of restless or keyed up.

Um and it may or may not be able to trace to something specific. So with stress, it's usually something that is more short term and can be really related to something specific. So you might have a big project at work that's that you're working on and there's a deadline coming up and you are stressed because you don't know if you're going to make that deadline and then after the deadline passes that, that stress tends to dissipate and it sure you're going to be stressed again at some point in your life, but it's not sort of this day in and day out feeling with anxiety on the other hand, that lingers, right? It can last for a really long time and it feels more constant and kind of um it sort of permeates other areas of your life as well.

So you also might encounter some difficulties in sleeping. For some people, it comes out as irritability or impatience. Some people get confused by that, especially for males, it can can seem like they have an anger issue, right? Anger management problems when in fact the root causes actually anxiety.

Um you might have the difference in appetite, you might start avoiding things that make you feel anxious. So it shows up in a lot of different ways. It can even have physical symptoms. So a lot of people experience anxiety in their stomach. Um this is especially true for children.

Sometimes children don't have the language or the self awareness to to articulate that they're feeling anxiety and so they'll just say their stomach hurts. Um this can be true for adults as well. There's also, it often shows up in the chest. Sometimes you might experience a tightness in your chest or some chest pains and it can also show up in your head in the form of headaches or some GI issues ,muscle tension.

You know, there are a lot of physical symptoms to it. So hopefully this was helpful video that can just let you hone in on whether what you're experiencing might actually be anxiety and if it is, if you think that, you know, we've surpassed the point of it being stress and that it's not really this short term problem, definitely reach out to a mental health professional in your state and they can really um teach you some tools and teach you how to think differently so that the anxiety is no longer um inhibiting you in the way that it is.

So I hope you found this video useful. I will be putting out new content every Friday and they'll be both informative and I'll also give you some tools and tips for managing anxiety. So I hope you all have a great weekend and I'll see you next time.