Welcome to Emotional Wellness Daily, a project of SIMHA, the Sephardic Initiative for Mental Health Awareness. Today we will discuss the topic of anxiety.
Before we go any further, we have to understand the difference between anxiety and stress. These are related concepts, but they actually have distinct characteristics and underlying mechanisms.
Stress is a general term that refers to the body's physical response to any demand or challenge, whether it's an actual practical challenge, an emotional challenge or a psychological challenge. It can be caused by factors such as work pressures, relationship difficulties, financial problems, or other major life changes. Stress is natural, and usually temporary. It's a reaction that activates the body's stress response, triggering physiological and psychological reactions.
Anxiety, on the other hand, is a specific emotional response characterized by feelings of apprehension, and more commonly, fear and worry.
Anxiety typically arises in anticipation of future events or situations that are perceived as threatening or challenging in some way.
Stress is a response to a specific stressor, whereas anxiety often arises in the absence of a specific threat or as a response to more generalized or ambiguous concerns.
Anxiety is something that God created us with. It's actually not a negative emotion in the sense that it's ‘bad.’ It's actually a protective emotion that lets us know when we're in danger. So, for example, if there was a tiger chasing us and we did not have this reaction called anxiety, what would happen to us? We would get eaten!
Anxiety tells us, “Okay, there's a danger here.” If we had a meeting with Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk tomorrow to present some sort of idea, in the hope that they invest in it, anxiety would give us the ability and motivate us to actually prepare, because if we did not have any anxiety at all, what would happen? We wouldn't be ready for it. We would go into the meeting ill-prepared, and seemingly indifferent to the gravity of the situation.
That's just an introductory level of understanding of anxiety.
A- How it's different than stress, and B- that it's not either a negative or positive emotion, but actually a God-given reaction to let us know when there is something dangerous, risky, or important that we need to be prepared for and ready to react to.
Thank you.