Anxiety, Stress, and Worry: The Three Horsemen of Unhappiness

Stress, anxiety, and worry are universal emotions. Unfortunately, despite their pervasive commonality they are not emotions that are generally sought after as the experience of them is generally considered to be negative. Admittedly, negative is an all too vague description of these dark horsemen of the emotional apocalypse. This lens will attempt to describe important similarities and differences between stress, worry, and anxiety, aswell as an explanation of what they are, what triggers them, what keeps them going, and most importantly, how to treat them effectively.

Anxiety Is a complex response that consists of physiological, cognitive, emotional, and behavioural components. Physiological sensations include the bodily responses such as heart palpitations, sweaty palms, increased blood pressure, and dilated pupils. Cognitive elements of anxiety include conscious worry (or negative self-talk) and other less conscious cognitive processes (such as negative automatic thoughts). Behavioural features of anxiety are those actions that are motivated by and follow from the experience of anxiety. These typically include fight or flight type behaviours.

Fear is perhaps the closest ally of anxiety and the easiest and most concise definition of its emotional attributes. Fear from an evolutionary perspective serves as an important warning of imminent danger; a looming predator, a hostile invader, or an out-of-control car are all possible fear provoking stimuli. Both fear and anxiety entail perceived threat. However, fear invariably focuses on a clear object while anxiety's sources can be indefinite and difficult to pinpoint. For example, fear might

The core feeling in anxiety, worry, and stress is uncertainty. For example, it is not being stabbed that people fear but the threat of being stabbed. Once one has been stabbed the fear and uncertainty is gone

It is that sense of impending doom, of being overwhelmed. It is that feeling lurking in the shadows of our perceived weakness, waiting to pounce upon our fragile ego when we feel those weaknesses about to be exposed. It is that feeling of ones capacity being unequal to lifes demands. Who would dispute that any or all of these feelings do not constitute a threat to the self?

Indeed in the competitive, materialistic, and media soaked modern landscape of society individuals are faced with ever-increasing awareness that there are a million ways to die, a million things to live for, and a million things one ought to be, have, and do. Perceived failures to be, do, and have, constitute threats to ones well being that can trigger fear and anxiety.

Stress is the consequence of the failure to adapt to change. It is, in medical terms, the consequence of the disruption of homeostasis through physical or psychological stimuli. Less simply: it's the condition that results when person-environment interaction leads someone to perceive a painful discrepancy, real or imagined, between the demands of a situation on the one hand and their social, biological, or psychological resources on the other. Stressful stimuli can be mental, physiological, anatomical or physical.

In 1974 Richard Lazarus published a model dividing stress into eustress and distress. Where stress enhances function (physical or mental, such as through strength training or challenging work) it may be considered eustress. Persistent stress that is not resolved through coping or adaptation, deemed distress, may lead to anxiety or withdrawal (depression) behavior. The difference between experiences which result in eustress or distress is determined by the disparity between an experience (real or imagined), personal expectations, and resources to cope with the stress. Alarming experiences, either real or imagined, can trigger a stress response. Therefore, Lazarus's model argues that cognitive processes of appraisal are central in determining whether a situation is potentially threatening or harmful.

Exerpt taken from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stress_%28biological%29

Worry represents the cognitive elements of anxiety.
This lens focuses on what can be done to unsaddle the three horsemen of unhappiness. Worry is perhaps the horsemen most easy to unsaddle. Anxiety entails many responses which are automatic and resistant to change while stress involves environmental factors; many of which are beyond our control.

Essentially you can picture worry as self-talk where the inner monologue regards possible negative events that might happen in the future and of which we are afraid. We internally analyse the event and think about how we might deal with it should the feared event actually happen. Worrying then is a type of vigilance for threat, and an attempt at mentally fixing problems that haven't yet happened. Often these endeavours yield no resolution and individuals are often left wondering if they ever will be.

Avoidance keeps us living in fear. It is the author of stagnation and self-criticism. Avoidance can keep us cowering in the shadows of mountains that seem too lofty and dangerous to summit but which are actually nothing more than molehills being viewed through the distorted magnifying lens of anxiety.

Many of us live under the illusion that our avoidance strategies are in our service. While it is true that avoidance can produce short-term relief from discomfort, it ultimately serves its true master - anxiety. Basically, every time we avoid something which we are fearful of we miss the chance to discover the feared object to not be so terrifying as we had imagined. For example the woman who believes that men are abusive might avoid relationships, thereby never gaining the opportunity to disprove her overgeneralisation. Additionally, she may pay particular attention to information that confirms this belief while ignoring evidence to the contrary.

The immediate pay-off that avoidance offers in the form of distress relief makes it seem like a useful tool and provides powerful emotional incentive to adopt it as a coping strategy in future fearful situations. In addition, we often feel self-critical after engaging in avoidant behavior as we think we ought to have done differently or that we are weak or flawed for not doing what we thought we ought to. Essentially, avoidance is like behavioural cocaine: it offers an immediate payoff that is extremely addictive (because of its perceived efficacy), but in the long term its addictive influence only narrows and restricts our life as we are compelled to live in increasingly inflexible ways to maintain the same high (in the form of distress relief) that the avoidance formerly offered.

The message then is clear. We must learn strategies to overcome our maladaptive avoidance strategies. "What is it that you fear"? If this question is hard to answer or unclear then you might try asking, "what is it that you avoid"? When we learn to cease our avoidance strategies and attempt to climb the mountains that confine and restrict our lives inspite of how high they might seem, then we will truly see them for what they are - molehills.

If you are struggling with anxiety then there is a battle raging in your mind and the casualty is you. If this anxiety is sufficiently intense or if your threshold for tolerating it is sufficiently low then you may have pushed the pause button on the movie of your life. Indeed you may have begun feeling afraid to engage in the activities you normally would because of your fear that you might have a panic attack or because you are overly worried or concerned about making a mistake or being humiliated or looking silly. You may have begun to live your life in such a way as to accommodate these unhelpful beliefs and your life may be narrowing by the day.

So, here is the million dollar question. If this anxiety or psychological pain vanished mysteriously in the night time; if the fairy godmother of your long deceased great granduncle visited you in your sleep and waved his magic mushroom over your flared nostrils and miraculously cured you of your anxiety, what would your life be like? WHAT WOULD YOU DO OR BE IF ANXIETY NO LONGER AFFECTED YOU? If the cloud of pain that had obscured your vision of things for so long was lifted what would you see? What would you want to see? Consider these questions. Take some time. Write freely and without restraint and design the life you would live if it was not shackled to psychological pain.

It is likely that if you have been suffering with the psychological pain of stress, worry, and anxiety for some time that it is something by which you have come to define your life by. It may be a part of your personal identity; a part of who you think you are. Unfortunately, when we have a view of ourselves it can create attentional biases that bend our vision and life experience in the direction of our self-perceptions. Hence, our belief that we are going to look foolish and do a poor job in a public appearance can result in a self-fulfilling prophecy as we present ourselves without confidence looking at the floor mumbling and blushing.

There are a million examples of how our views of our self function to construct our actual experiences, but the bottom line is this, overcoming anxiety, stress, and worry is not about getting rid of anxiety, stress, and worry. This will likely result in only more anxiety, stress, or worry. The secret to getting rid of them is to decide how you would like your life to be and then start living that way REGARDLESS OF anxiety, stress, and worry.