Understanding the Differences Between Worry and Stress

With all that is going on in our world, it is easy to get consumed by negative emotions and to find ourselves overwhelmed and dominated by WORRY and STRESS. Today’s 24/7 news cycle combined with unlimited commentary on social media platforms provides constant reminders about the negative impacts of COVID-19, civil unrest due to racial inequalities, and increasing unemployment numbers.

What are you doing to effectively manage worry and stress? To effectively manage worries and stresses, it is important to understand the subtle distinctions between these two states and what actions are effective for reducing each one respectively. 

WORRY

Worrying is feeling uneasy or being overly concerned about a situation or problem. With excessive worrying, your mind and body go into overdrive as you constantly focus on "what might happen." Worry can be helpful and productive in that it can thrust us in to action and prevent procrastination, but constant worrying, negative thinking, and always expecting the worst can take a toll on your emotional and physical health.

By exposing your worries and talking about it with someone close to you it becomes a whole lot easier to see the situation or issue for what it really is. Verbalizing your worries helps you return to your neutral state and diminish negative emotions. As worry is a mental state, these three cognitive tools can help to challenge and disrupt the negative impacts of excessive worry.

Talk to a Trusted Friend

Feeling heard is an extremely effective way to sort out your thoughts and help you regain perspective and see a situation more positively. Sharing your worries with a trusted friend can make a big difference in lessening its obsessive grip on you. Most of the time you don’t need others to solve your worries, but just to listen as you work through your negative emotions.

Write Down Your Worries

Maybe you prefer to write your worries or want to reflect on them before sharing with others. A regular practice of journaling about your worries can help provide dedicated time to get worries out of your head. As you write down your concerns, here are a few questions to keep in mind:

• What exactly are you worried about?
• Are your worries realistic? What is the probability of them happening?
• What are your feelings about the situation?
• What’s the worst-case scenario?
• What steps you can take to tackle the object of your worry?

Define Your Control

Unfortunately, we don’t have control over many of the things that happen in our lives. This makes it important to clarify which aspects of the situation you have control of and which ones you don’t. The point is to create awareness by defining the worries that we have to let go of because they’re out of our hands, while at the same time identifying the areas where our efforts will have a real impact.

Stephen Covey’s Circle of Influence provides a practical framework for when one needs to challenge feelings of helplessness by identifying attitudes and activities within your control or influence that will enable you to improve the situation.

STRESS

Stress is a physical response to a perceived danger that prepares the body to be aware of and respond to threatening circumstances. Stress becomes negative when a person faces continuous challenges without relief or relaxation between challenges. As a result, the person becomes overworked and stress-related tension builds. Below are two ways to reduce the negative effects of stress.

Develop a Healthy Stress Mindset

“Stress,” by definition, is our RESPONSE OR REACTION to a stressor—which means stress should be, to a large degree, under our control. How then, do we respond in such a way to these stresses that we do not become derailed—but instead adapt and thrive under these circumstances?

In her wildly popular TED talk, Stanford researcher and bestselling author Kelly McGonigal shares research that shows one of the most important factors for healthy stress management seems to be how well people cope with stress rather than how much stress they face.

Studies show that people who view stress as a bad thing are more negatively affected in terms of happiness and health. Those who view it as a motivator report fewer symptoms such as headaches, backaches, and fatigue—even though they experienced the same amount of stress. The positive aspects of stress include improved cognitive ability and increased productivity and memory. A healthy stress mindset includes:

• Looking at a stressful situation as a challenge rather than a threat.
• Awareness that your body’s response to stress is helping you prepare for peak performance.
• Understanding that stress is caused only by things you find important. Connect with the meaning, and you’ll be able to make stress work for you.

Breathe 

We have an intuitive understanding that breathing patterns can calm our mind and emotions. Most of us have either told others or been told ourselves to "take a deep breath” when encountering difficult situations. Most clinical psychologists and medical doctors use some kind of breathing practice with patients. However, because breathing happens automatically, many of us don’t give our breath as much attention as it deserves and have not learned to harness its full potential to calm our minds and reduce stress.

One of the reasons breathing can change how you feel is that our emotions and breathing are closely connected. Researcher Pierre Phillipot made two profound discoveries about the connection between breathing and emotions.

• Your breathing mimics your emotions. This one is fairly simple to understand. When you are excited, you breathe quickly and in a shallow manner; when you are calm and relaxed, you draw in slow, deep breaths.
• Your emotions mimic your breathing. That means we can change how we feel by using our breath. If you want to get worked up quickly, start taking in fast, shallow breaths; if you want to calm down, take in slow, deep ones. 

Other physical activities that help reduce stress include:

• Meditation
• Regular Exercise
• Sleep - a minimum of 7 to 8 hours at night
• Rest and renew intermittently during the day

What are some additional strategies that you use to lessen the negative effects of worry and stress in your life?

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Tony Gambill is the founder and principal for ClearView Leadership, an innovative leadership and talent development consulting firm based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Tony brings more than 20 years of executive experience in leadership development, coaching, and team effectiveness within global for-profit, non-profit, technical, research, healthcare, government and higher educational industries.