Anxiety & Worry: Are They the Same?
(This post was written after listening to the podcast Typology, an excellent podcast about the Enneagram assessment and how it can be of benefit to mental health. Here’s a link to that podcast here:)
Anxiety is all the rage as it rightfully should be in our modern times. The 24/7 news cycle, growing political unease, the increasingly dire economy. Oh, and dinner still needs to be cooked (because eating out is too much $).
We all know that anxiety and worry are similar. However, an issue that might be subtle to most (including myself) is how while they may be connected, they are still two entirely different phenomena. Here below I’ll take a stab at what I believe to be the differences between the two, how one often leads to the other, and a few tips on how to manage when they come.
Worry is an emotion often expressed via a thought.
“I just don’t know if she likes me.”
“How are we gonna make rent?”
“I think the transmission in our car is struggling”
This is fairly obvious; we all know when we worry and can often easily point to what’s causing the worry.
The difference between it and anxiety is that worry comes from the head than relays to the heart while anxiety is the body’s way to understand the communication received to it by the head/heart pairing (even this clumsy metaphor isn’t meant to compartmentalize the mind/body/heart connection as all of these phenomena happen instantaneously). Anxiety is the fidgeting you do after you see she hasn’t responded to your text, the nail-biting you do when the checking account is close to or surpassing the red. Anxiety is the deep beating in your chest, mixed with dread and almost experienced as a little “t” trauma when you go to start your car prepping for a long trip without knowing how it’ll do.
Simply put, worry starts the anxiety train, and while doing thought work around quelling the basis of your worries is of great value, not giving your body capacity to soothe and cope is why anxiety often seems to “go nowhere” (as it literally has nowhere to go) even after you’ve changed your thought life.
This is where the power of mindfulness exercises, breathe work, and/or going for a walk and similarly body oriented actions soothe better than any change of thought or shift in mood. They soothe the space that most often experiences the anxiety and eventually give you the better headspace which can enable a better thought life. To heal the mind and attend to the heart, the body must be respected, nurtured, and tended to.
(Another disclaimer; trauma comes in and often works as worries that were confirmed when you were younger, such as “will someone protect me from such and such” or “I guess my presence doesn’t matter” and then because no one did in fact protect you and/or things repeatedly happened which confirmed your belief in your presence not mattering. These build up over time and keeps these anxieties on lock in a perpetual cycle to protect you. In this case, your body is hijacked in its state of hyper vigilance and does anything in its power to keep you protected in a variety of different survival strategies. The good news is, though, there is hope to overcome it! For this work, a brief blog won’t be enough; reaching out to a trauma-informed therapist will likely be needed.)