How Stress and Anxiety Work Together?

The words stress and anxiety are two related terms. Stress may come from the most ordinary to the most unexpected pressures in life. When circumstances beyond your control take place, fatigue and other obstructive effects occur.

Among the most common offshoots of stress is anxiety and no wonder these two words are strictly inseparable.

To dig deeper into the relationship of anxiety and stress, you must learn first about the nature of anxiety and stress, their signs, symptoms, causes and effects.

Stress is both a physiological and psychological way of responding to certain events and affects the normal balance of our system.

When we usually face a pressing situation, our body and brain react accordingly in order to cope with the tension that is building up in our body. We start to sweat heavily, our muscles become tense, and headache starts to set in. When we can no longer cope with the tensions of our body, this is when stress and anxiety tandem becomes relevant.

If you had been to an anxiety disorder specialist before, you might probably have come across the term fight or flight.

The fight or flight response is the best way to explain the relationship between stress and anxiety. A very good example is the prehistoric battle of cave dwellers and saber tooth tigers. When the human devouring beat confronts the cave dwellers, their body reacts accordingly.

The thought of losing their caves, food and family members are triggering enough to cause them stress, they feel threatened, and they feel frightened that they want to flee or run for their lives, but they also want to fight back, thus the term fight or flight.

These mixed emotions are the perfect ingredients of stress. The brain then signals all the systems in the body to supply more oxygen to the veins, more stress hormones such as cortisol, adrenaline, and norepinephrine.

Depending on how the cave dwellers bodies accept the sudden surge of the stress hormones, they will either fight the saber tooth tiger or flee from the scene and protect themselves.

Nowadays, these fight or flight response is still very much present. Unfortunately, for others who have hard time managing stress and anxiety, they prefer to flee from a situation rather fight.

Both stress and anxiety share the same warning signs and symptoms. Memory problems, indecisiveness, and inability to focus are just some of the cognitive symptoms that both share.

When it comes to emotional symptoms, stress also causes the person to display moodiness, agitation, restlessness, short temper.

The effects of stress and anxiety are also alarming. It can lead to migraine, ulcer, infertility, obesity, and high blood pressure. However, you can prevent these from happening, if you check with a specialist right now. Discuss about the stress and anxiety you are experiencing today. 

Bookmark this page

DeliciousFacebookGoogle BookmarksYahoo My Web

Related Readings