Anxious and frightening emotions can feel the same and be easily confused. Fear and anxiety are closely related. Both contain the idea of danger or possibility of injury. Fear and anxiety both produce a similar stress response to a real or a perceived threat.1 However, fear is an immediate response to a threat, whereas anxiety occurs in anticipation of a threat. Examining these different emotions can help you determine what you are truly experiencing.
What is Anxiety?
Anxiety is a natural human emotion in response to a stressful or perceived threatening situation. Anxiety is thought to have evolved to protect us from future endangerment because it alerts us when there is a foreseen threat. This cue allows us to make the necessary adjustments and take appropriate measures to cope with the stressors, or risks in our environment.
Without anxiety, we would get into trouble, make poor decisions, or neglect life’s responsibilities and obligations. While anxiety may feel unpleasant, a reasonable amount can be useful and even healthy. Short spurts of anxiety can urge us to think through our choices and actions, solve day-to-day problems and remain productive within society.
Anxiety can manifest differently in everyone. For many people, anxiousness surfaces in anticipation of an unclear threat or a future event. Sometimes, anxious feelings can emerge if you believe you are in danger but you are not. In other instances, higher levels of anxiety may be prompted by an overreaction to a threat you perceive as more serious than it really is.
These disproportionate reactions usually produce unwarranted, intense, and frequent feelings of anxiety. Consequently, these reactions are reflected in self-destructive behaviours such as avoidance of anxiety-provoking situations, obsessive worrying/overthinking, social isolation, or dependent behaviours like substance misuse or overeating.
What is Fear?
Fear is an emotion believed to have evolved to increase our probabilities of staying safe when faced with a threatening situation. Fear automatically kicks in as a response to a real or perceived mental or physical menace to our well-being or safety. What follows is a series of biochemical reactions in our body where our sympathetic nervous system is activated, and stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline are released priming us to either stay or escape the adverse or unexpected event. This reaction is known as the fight-or-flight response, which is deemed to be essential to life.
Fear is a survival mechanism that plays a vital role in how we manage stress and detect hazards in our environment. Fear functions as an alerting system that can shield us from danger and provide us with some leeway to make appropriate decisions such as to stay or leave.
What does anxiety and fear feel like?
Here is a list of physical and psychological symptoms that both fear and anxiety have in common:3,4
Physical Symptoms of Fear & Anxiety
Both fear and anxiety include physical symptoms including:
- Rapid heartbeat and high blood pressure
- Quick breathing or shortness of breath
- Trembling/shaking
- Nausea and upset stomach
- Chest pain
- Sweating/chills
- Muscle tension
- Dilated Pupils
- Dry mouth
Psychological Symptoms of Fear & Anxiety
Fear and anxiety both can include psychological symptoms, such as:
- Feeling overwhelmed
- Feeling out of control
- Feeling detached from your body
- Inability to think clearly
- Impending doom
How to know if you’re experiencing Fear or Anxiety
Fear and anxiety symptoms can feel similar and can co-occur. Although these emotions overlap, every person undergoes a different experience. These differences can be attributed to several factors such as the nature of the triggering event, a person’s mental or emotional endurance and their resources. Nevertheless, many experts believe that there are clear distinctions behind these emotions.
In sum, fear develops suddenly and is related to a known and well-defined threat, whereas anxiety arises in anticipation of an unspecified and unclear threat.
Ask yourself the following questions to determine whether you are experiencing fear or anxiety:
- Is my fear/anxiety connected to something happening right now?
- Does my fear/anxiety subside once the threat/stress is gone?
- Is my fear/anxiety caused by a non-threatening situation or does it emerge unexpectedly?
- Does my fear/anxiety seem out of proportion to the actual circumstance?
- Do I experience recurrent episodes of sudden feelings of intense anxiety and fear or terror that reach a peak within minutes?
- Do I frequently experience intrusive uncontrollable thoughts that cause me fear/anxiety?
- Does my fear/anxiety keep me constantly mentally preoccupied?
- Are there certain actions that I need to perform over and over to ease my anxiety/fear?
- Does my fear/anxiety stem from a past stressful/traumatic event? If so, has it been persistent?
- Does a specific object, situation, or place almost always provoke a fear/anxiety response?
- Am I frequently avoiding certain people, places, or things that cause me fear/anxiety?
- Is my fear or anxiety persistent and interfering with my ability to enjoy life and function effectively?
If you enjoyed reading this article and are looking for an accredited Acceptance and Commitment Therapist, then feel free to contact me via my contact form that can be found by clicking HERE, or if you’d like to know more about me then please click HERE. Click here if you’d like to know more about a counsellor and here is you’d like to know more about a therapist.
No Comments