“74% of UK adults have felt so stressed at some point over the last year they felt overwhelmed or unable to cope”
-Statistic from The Mental Health Foundation, 14 May 2018. By YouGov in the largest known study of stress levels in the UK.
Have you felt disconnected, uncertain or worried about a loss of control?
65% of people in the UK have felt even more stressed around these themes since the COVID-19 restrictions began in March 2020 (the Stress Management Society).
I know this is distressing statistics but by understanding stress and anxiety, you can make sense of the unpleasant and often scary stress symptoms.
Just that mindset shift often helps by normalising stress. Better though, by understanding it’s easier to find effective strategies to manage and unwind that stress and anxiety.
How are Stress and Anxiety different?
Simply put stress comes from outside pressures and anxiety comes from inside pressures (your mind), but they are often used interchangeably.
This makes sense as outside pressures that persist often lead to anxiety. On the other hand, being anxious leads to thinking styles that make you more sensitive to external stress.
The symptoms are also generally the same for stress & anxiety.
So why does the difference matter?
It matters when you consider how to manage your symptoms of stress and anxiety.
Stress can come from for example all the lockdown measures imposed on us by Covid-19: changes to how you work; if you work; illness; being isolated; being crammed in with your whole family trying to work and study; managing your children’s moods; not having much to look forward to; not being able to exercise as usual. I’m sure you can think of more.
Anxiety comes from how you think about these stressors. When you’re anxious you’re more alert for dangers. You think more about them, and generally in a negative way.
You may need approaches for both outside stressors and learn ways to manage your inner anxiety to feel more in control. You may only need strategies for one of them. Or you may not be able to change anything about the outside stressor, so you have to use strategies for anxiety to cope better.
An obvious example is how Covid has imposed restrictions. We can’t quit, move, discuss or organise our way out of this. It is out of our control. So even though the stressor is external, we have no choice but learn how to manage our minds to cope.
Fight/Flight/Freeze response
Evolution created extra areas in our brains rather than change what was there already.
This means that we basically have two brains: the primitive one that we share with other mammals and the human mind. (We also have a third, the reptile brain, that controls all sorts of bodily functions but as it’s not a thinking part, I’m leaving it out).
The primitive brain and the human mind think differently because they have different purposes.
The primitive brain is with us from before we were even Stone Age people. When this primitive mind thinks something is threatening us, it activates the fight/flight/freeze response. This is a very strong system to manage stressors.
Have you ever had a presentation or interview where you felt your heart beat faster, your mouth went dry, and suddenly your well-prepared information felt really hard to remember?
That’s the f/f/f response as it releases stress hormones such as adrenalin and cortisol. These help your heart to beat faster to help you run or fight better; your hands can feel tingly as the blood is redistributed; your tummy goes upside down; you can feel faint and nauseous; your hearing, sight and mind get very focused; the connection to your human thinking mind is slowed down or even closed off. All this prepares your body and mind to survive by fighting, running off, or playing dead.
You may think it’s counter intuitive that you can’t think and focus clearly when stressed? You’re supposed to act if you come across something life-threatening. Thinking could slow you down.
For example, your primitive mind still thinks it’s perfectly likely that you’ll find a polar bear in your driveway. You’re not supposed to ponder on if the polar bear has already eaten, or how soft the fur might be if you run your hands through it. Just run!
The primitive mind really wants you to survive so it helps you by slowing or even shutting down the connection to your human, thinking mind. That’s why it’s so difficult to remember, focus and think when we feel stressed.
Rest & Digest system
When the incident is over, your nervous system should shift over into the “rest & digest” state again.
Your body starts to feel normal. You also start to think from your human mind again. This is where we plan, organise, think logically, are creative, have values and beliefs and much more.
The balance of this system works really well if most of the things that happened to us were still things like a hungry polar bear lurking behind your car in your driveway, or a tribe of cannibals appeared at the bottom of your garden ready to scalp you for a trophy! (Not that I want any of these scenarios…).
Unfortunately, the primitive mind has not evolved to understand that pressures from e.g. Covid-19 should not have the same full-on stress response as from a hungry polar bear. It just sees any stress as a threat to survival. The longer the stress goes on, and the more things there are that need our attention, the bigger and the hungrier the primitive mind thinks the enemy is…
When stress is prolonged, the nervous system doesn’t shift back into “rest & digest”. It stays fired up. That’s when we start experiencing the symptoms of being stressed and anxious.
Symptoms of stress and anxiety
As anxiety and stress are so interlinked, I’ll treat the symptoms as the same.
Below are some of the symptoms of stress and anxiety:
Emotional symptoms
Feeling overwhelmed; feeling like a wind-up toy spinning out of control; feeling under constant pressure; general feeling of doom; being excessively worried; fearful; avoiding situations; lack of motivation; short fuse (getting angry); withdrawing from people.
Cognitive symptoms
Struggling with concentration, focus, “brain fog”, memory, planning, being indecisive.
Physical symptoms
Feeling short of breath; tension headaches; tummy problems; IBS; sleeping problems; heart problems, lowered immunity, high blood pressure.
As you can see from the long list of symptoms, and these are only some, stress and anxiety are absolutely draining to live with and the impact on everyday life can be huge. They are also related to many diseases.
The Stress Bucket
We all encounter demanding situations every day, big and small. The person who cut in front of you while driving; your child having a tantrum; yet another Zoom meeting; Covid.
If we don’t resolve these situations, they end up in our emotional stress bucket. And when this gets full, it can overflow. That’s when we have, or see in others, an emotional outburst that was out of proportion to what happened i.e. “the straw that broke the camel’s back”. Or we just cannot function normally any longer.
Luckily, there are ways to empty the stress bucket when we’re already at that stage. There are also long-term things we can do to not get to the overflow stage so easily again.
To recap:
Being stressed and anxious is part of our survival strategy. It has served us extremely well – without it, we would instead have been a short (but tasty!) interval in earth’s history.
Becoming stressed and anxious is not a sign of a malfunctioning brain.
Staying stressed though can make us ill and the thinking styles that come with anxiety can be very unhelpful in our modern world.
I will get into strategies to manage the primitive mind and stress in my next few blogs this month so please check those if you’re interested in feeling more in control, be healthier, and have more joy in your life.
I hope this explanation of stress & anxiety has helped you make sense of why we have these often distressing symptoms. You are not weird or wrong for having them – it means you have a human brain.