To begin any journey toward emotional healing, we need to understand what stress, anxiety and trauma are actually. These reactions can sometimes feel pretty similar in certain ways and people often confuse them, but they affect your body and mind in very different ways. Knowing these differences helps us recognize what we are actually experiencing and it helps us to choose the correct responses.
Stress is your body’s natural response when something feels demanding, overwhelming or when it doesn’t fully understand what’s happening. These demands can come in two different shapes and can be either physiologicalRef or psychologicalRef and external or internal. An external demand is something that comes from outside your body like preparing for an exam, having to face a conflict or trying to handle unexpected responsibilities. An internal demand can be a feeling like guilt, the fear of failure or self doubt.
When any of these demands are detected, the sympathetic nervous systemRef then becomes active. This system releases hormones like adrenaline and it helps to prepare your body to respond quickly to the event at hand. This is the fight or flight mechanismRef that we will talk about later.
Short bursts of stress have been proven to be helpful. The American psychological associationRef explains that short term stress can sharpen attention, and it can even boost your motivation and improve your work ethic and performance, so you are able to meet deadlines.
However, stress can turn chronicRef, and it then becomes harmful. Chronic stress disrupts your sleeping habits, weakens your immune system and it even affects your emotional balance and how you perceive and feel emotions. It drains your energy and makes your day-to-day life harder. As it turns out, stress is not the main problem, it’s how long it lasts that determines if it’s positive or negative.
Anxiety is often confused with stress, but they are in fact way more different than what we think. As it is, stress responds to something in the present that immediately threatens you, while anxiety comes from making up scenarios of danger in the future. When you suffer from anxiety you will constantly find yourself in a “what if” type of mindset and you will expect the worst to happen.
Your brain treats imagined threats like real ones, and it makes it so that your body is always tense and on high alert. Anxiety makes it harder to concentrate and to think clearly. Some physical pains can happen like tightness in your chest or stomach-aches.
A helpful way to imagine anxiety is to picture it as a smoke alarm that always rings even though there isn’t a fire in its vicinity. The same way stress can be helpful, a little anxiety can also sometimes be useful because it enhances your cautiousness. Whenever anxiety becomes persistent though, it will interfere with your daily lifestyle and can create a long-lasting disorder. To sum it up, stress is in the present and anxiety is in the future.
Trauma is way more different from stress and anxiety on a fundamental standpoint. It occurs when someone experiences something so overwhelming that their brain can’t process it. The event then becomes stuck in the brain instead of being integrated. The emotional weight of the event continues long after the real danger has passed.
Traumatic experiences can have many forms, but the most common ones are physical/sexual violence, a war, serious accidents (car, plane, etc.), natural disasters or the sudden death of someone you held deep feelings for. What needs to be understood is how deeply it affects your ability to cope not only the event itself.
During a state of trauma, your usual coping strategies may stop working because your mind is overloaded. Much past research prove that trauma modifies habits in key parts of the brain. The amygdalaRef is supposed to detect danger and control your fear and how you react to said event. While in a traumatic event, it becomes hyperactive, and it will constantly send alarm signals like a radar that detects an unidentified object. Furthermore, the prefrontal cortex is responsible for judgement and reasoning in your brain. It’s the main factor for determining outcomes. It becomes less active and slowly becomes less effective whenever you are dealing with trauma.
Because of these changes in your brain, trauma can create nightmares, intrusive memories, flashbacks and sometimes, in rare instances, dissociation. Your body then remains in a high alert state even though the danger that you faced multiple years ago isn’t present anymore. This is why trauma is more than just a trivial and benign thing; it becomes a long-term disruption of the nervous system rather than just a normal emotional reaction.
A traumatic event is often an event where you were actually threatened. These events cause symptoms that hurt you in the long run and most of the time it leads to a post traumatic stress disorder. PTSDRef includes the effects we mentioned before and adds on top of it negative beliefs about others and yourself and it adds irritability.
To conclude, understanding the differences between stress, anxiety and trauma can help you get a clearer foundation of what’s wrong and help you begin your healing journey. It allows you to support yourself with more awareness of the situation and compassion.