Anxiety, Depression, Stress: Why the Differences Matter 
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Anxiety, depression and stress — just about everyone feels these emotions at some time. All are common reactions to life’s challenges, from losing a loved one to going through a divorce. On the surface they can look a lot alike, but there are distinct differences.
Is It Anxiety or Depression?
If you often feel anxious or depressed for no apparent reason, you may have an anxiety disorder, depression, or both. It’s not unusual for someone to suffer from both conditions at the same time. In fact, just about half of those diagnosed with depression are also diagnosed with an anxiety disorder.
Depression and anxiety are serious but treatable illnesses. The same medications may be used to ease symptoms of each condition. The two also share similar symptoms, like nervousness, irritability, insomnia and problems concentrating, but each has its own causes.
Anxiety: If you have an anxiety disorder, you may experience:
- Fear, panic or anxiety in situations where most people would not feel anxious or threatened
- A constant nagging worry or anxiousness
- Sudden panic or anxiety attacks without any clear trigger
Untreated, these disorders can limit your ability to work, maintain relationships or even leave the house.
Depression: When you’re depressed, it affects just about everything in your life — how you think, feel, behave and function. You may experience one or more of these symptoms:
- Discouragement
- Sadness
- Hopelessness
- Anger
- Lack of motivation or interest in life in general
- Low energy level
- Insomnia
- Feeling overwhelmed by daily tasks and personal interactions
If these feelings last longer than two weeks, and interfere with daily activities like spending time with friends, caring for your family or going to work, most likely you’re experiencing a major depressive episode.
In fact, just about half of those diagnosed with depression are also diagnosed with an anxiety disorder.
What About Stress?
Stress and anxiety may seem similar, but they’re not the same. The difference? Stress is a response to daily pressures or a threatening situation, while anxiety is a reaction to the stress. Anxiety, which has no clear cause, tends to last longer and be more difficult to treat.
Stress affects a lot of people, and can influence your health. Symptoms include:
- Headaches
- High blood pressure
- Chest pain
- Heart palpitations
- Skin rashes
- Loss of sleep
Stress typically goes away when the stressors disappear. However, chronic stress can escalate into anxiety or depression, so it’s important to take steps to reduce or eliminate stress whenever possible.
If you’re not sure whether you’re suffering from stress, anxiety or depression, don’t delay in talking to a health care provider to get the help you need. The journey to recovery begins with defining the cause of your issues and getting the right treatment.
It’s easy to get the care you need.
See a Premier Physician Network provider near you.
Schedule Now 
[Originally published: May 21, 2020. Updated: Sep 22, 2022.]
Long before the coronavirus pandemic mixed fear and uncertainty into daily life, Americans felt stressed out.
They worried about the country’s rising health care costs, struggled to pay them, and wondered if they could even access care in the future. One-quarter of U.S. adults reported discrimination—based on race and gender—as a significant source of stress. And on an individual level, work and money ranked as the top two major stressors, all according to a 2019 study.
Wherever constant stress lives, so too does its more agitated and debilitating cousin: anxiety. About 31% of Americans will experience an anxiety disorder at some point in their lives, with adult and teen women experiencing one far more often than men, according to the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health.
The problem has worsened during the pandemic, with the percentage of adults reporting recent symptoms of anxiety or a depressive disorder increasing from 36.4% to 41.5% between August and February of 2021.
Now, Americans have been reporting even more heightened anxiety about inflation, loss of income, and gun violence, according to a national poll from the American Psychiatric Association in June 2022.
Given all these factors, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) recently released a draft recommendation saying doctors should screen all adults under age 65 for anxiety. The USPSTF is a group of independent medical experts that makes recommendations to guide doctors. The draft recommendation is not final, and the public can make comments on it through Oct. 17. The group says the intention is to help prevent mental health problems from going undetected and untreated for years. It made a similar recommendation for children and teenagers earlier this year.
What’s more, anxiety often goes hand-in-hand with depression. Nearly half of people diagnosed with depression also have an anxiety disorder, according to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America. At any one time, “about 7% of the U.S. population meets criteria for a major depressive disorder,” says Rachel Katz, MD, a psychiatrist at Yale Psychiatric Hospital.
As if those statistics weren’t worrying enough, the pandemic has upended daily life in numerous ways over the past few years—causing sickness, death, job loss, and disrupting schedules for children and adults.
“With these concerns, the experience right now is, ‘I don’t have a lot of control over what is happening around me,’” says Carolyn M. Mazure, PhD, a Yale Medicine psychologist and director of Women’s Health Research at Yale.
Feeling a lack of control over a situation can lead to stress, anxiety, and even depression. Recognizing the differences between the them can lead to the right treatment.
In day-to-day talking with our friends or family, we tend to speak of depression, stress and anxiety as if they are interchangeable or describing the same thing. This is not the case. Part of the reason for coming to see a psychologist, is to sort out whether any of these descriptions fit your experience. It is also important to remember that many people have elements of depression and anxiety and may not have “clinical diagnosis” and may not require medication.
- Depression refers to an experience where you feel down most of the time which is called “low mood” and you have also lost interest in things you usually enjoy. You may also have changes in your sleep, appetite, feel guilty, de-motivated and generally withdraw from others.
- Stress is usually characterized by a sense of feeling overwhelmed. This feeling may be due to your coping capacity being over-stretched or having been under pressure for too long. Some stress can help us to perform our day to day functions, too much stress leaves us “distressed” and often exhausted.
- Anxiety is a sense of fear or dread that something terrible is going to happen. Anxiety can be general or specific to a place, social situation or thing (phobia)
Depression, stress and anxiety are the most common problems that lead people to go to a psychologist. At Psychology on Parade, you will receive what is called “evidence-based” treatment without that treatment being out of a text book or too simplistic.
What do we know about depression?
- It is the fourth most significant cause of suffering and disability worldwide behind heart disease, cancer and traffic accidents
- It will be the second most debilitating human condition by 2020
- Depression exists in a social, psychological and biological context; that is depression is influenced by genetics, diseases, hormones, cognitive distortions, influences of family/workplace/friends, history and drug/alcohol use to name a few
- Depression onset is associated with the number of anxiety issues a person may have, the persistence of anxiety based avoidance behaviors and how much they affect the person’s psychosocial functioning. Put simply, if you have enough anxiety symptoms for long enough and they affect your life enough you will probably get depressed
- Insomnia and loss of energy are the most common symptoms of depression across cultures and women had a higher rate in all countries
- Response styles effect depressed mood and affect the course of depressive episodes so ruminative responses, that is thinking about things over and over again, prolong and intensify depressive episodes, create a level of passivity and negativity that are likely to raise the level of depressive symptoms in individuals over time
- Therapies with the greatest empirical support all emphasise ACTION in treatment; clients may feel better in merely supportive therapy but they will do better in treatment with direction
- Depression has serious health consequences not just for mood. Studies have shown that a group of adults from 55-85 years who did not have heart disease at the start of the study but experienced major depression had their risk of death from heart disease quadruple. For those who had already had a history of heart disease, cardiac deaths tripled in those suffering from major depression (Penninx et al, Archives of General Psychiatry, March, 2001)
- Depression is a risk factor also in stroke influencing frequency, functional recovery and possible post-stroke mortality ( Nemeroff & O’Connor, American heart Journal, October, 2000
Socrates said: “The unexamined life isn’t worth living”. Given the down side of rumination, neither is theoverexamined life!
What is psychological treatment about then?
Our brains naturally try to create meaning or patterns from our experience. Ambiguity and uncertainty arise from the brain/mind’s desire to understand and it is the tolerance or lack of tolerance for these uncertainties that can partly explain anxiety or depressive reaction. Our perspective on life which is called our attributional style can affect how we deal with events and experiences. So negative attributional styles include seeing events as global (“It affects everything”) or stable (“It will always be this way”) or internal (“It’s me”) or external (“It’s them”). All of these things then predict progress in treatment, recovery and proneness to relapse in mental health.
One of the first goals of treatment is to help the client shift to a position of contemplating change and therefore to be experiencing an “unstable attributional style” that is to create a sense of realistic hopefulness
We pursue this goal by developing a therapeutic alliance between the client and therapist so that the client’s goals and the means and ends of achieving those goals are supported by the relationship between the client and their psychologist. We try to help clients to shift their focus in listening to internal self talk or beliefs (“What is worth listening to?”) and look at future possibilities rather than past events as a guide to choices. Therapy is thus a processs of reinforcement of critically thinking about our thinking and its relative merits as a guide to action. This involves help with symptom management, that is developing skills to manage, for example, panic attacks, avoidance, communication, relationships, ‘bad days’, de-motivation, hopelessness etc
