Anxiety or Worry - the difference

Anxiety is your body’s natural threat response system. When your brain believes you are in danger, it sends out a series of signals to your body, resulting in the fight-or-flight response. Worry is a component of anxiety symptoms. 

• Anxiety has three main components: emotional, physiological, and cognitive.
• Imagine you have a presentation coming up at work. You might notice feelings of fear and dread, two examples of the emotional component. You may also notice bodily sensations, such as heart palpitations, sweating, or a tightness in your stomach, which represent the physiological component. Finally, worries and negative thoughts about what might happen in the future are the cognitive component. While worry is an important part of anxiety, it is only one of the three main building blocks.
• Anxiety in itself is not bad. Normal levels of anxiety lie on one end of a spectrum and may present as low levels of fear or apprehension, mild sensations of muscle tightness and sweating, or doubts about your ability to complete a task. 
• Symptoms of normal anxiety do not negatively interfere with daily functioning. They may actually improve your attention and problem-solving, motivate you to work harder toward a goal, or warn you about a potential threat. For example, anxiety about an upcoming exam will likely drive you to prepare fully. Normal levels of anxiety can be adaptive and helpful to your everyday life.
• Clinical levels of anxiety fall toward the other end of the spectrum. Diagnosable anxiety disorders occur when anxiety levels rise enough to rapidly decrease performance and cause impairment.
• Anxiety disorders are characterized by severe, persistent worry that is excessive for the situation, and extreme avoidance of anxiety-provoking situations. These symptoms cause distress, impair daily functioning, and occur for a significant period. If you believe you may have an anxiety disorder, seek help as soon as possible.
• When the level of anxiety you experience is no longer adaptive or helpful to your performance and becomes a barrier to your enjoyment of life, but does not yet meet the diagnostic threshold for an anxiety disorder, you are “almost anxious.” Someone who is “almost anxious” may sit at their desk all day, making minimal progress on an assignment due to constant worries and tightness in the stomach. While anxiety did not make it impossible to come to work, the level of anxiety experienced is making it hard to function. 

Identify situations that make you anxious, and approach them instead of avoiding them. For example, if you are afraid of public speaking, talk in front of others as often as possible. Over time, you will find the discomfort fades away as you face the very things that used to cause you anxiety!