Part of developing our emotional intelligence and emotional agility is the ability to observe and name our mental and emotional states and understand the difference between them. Sometimes events, thoughts, and feelings get all jumbled up, and we find ourselves in a state of overwhelm dominated by worry, anxiety, and stress.
It is important to understand the subtle but essential distinction between these three states, their functions, and the fact that they manifest in different parts of our brains.
In his book The worry solution, Dr Martin Rossman highlights this distinction. He explains that worry is a type of thinking which is characterized by mental rumination – a state in which we tend to turn problems over and over in our brains. Worry is predominantly a mental state which is located in the prefrontal cortex – the newest and most uniquely human part of our brain.
We suffer more from imagination than from reality. - Seneca
Anxiety, on the other hand, is an uncomfortable feeling of unease or dread which gets activated in the limbic part of our brain, an evolutionary older, more emotional and intuitive part of the brain. A persons propensity towards anxiety depends on several factors including genes, gender, early family life, level of trauma, and life experience in general.
Stress, the third aspect of this uncomfortable triad, is a physical response to a perceived danger that prepares the body for survival in threatening circumstances. Stress is a part of the very ancient fight or flight survival system, which is a spontaneous, unconscious reaction activated in the oldest part of the brain – the reptilian brain.
Modern stresses are different from the stresses of our ancestors who were in very real danger from predators and enemy tribes.
For most of us in developed world, predominant sources of stress are now internal rather than external. They have much more to do with what we think about than with what happens to us. - Dr Martin Rossman
Understanding the distinctions between worry, anxiety, and stress can help us to use the right tools and strategies to self-regulate and better cope with them..
Breathing techniques (which I have explored in a previous post), for example, are helpful with calming the more physical effects of anxiety and stress, while cognitive tools (such as The four powerful questions) help us to challenge and disrupt the mental ruminations and loops of worry.
Mindfulness enables us to access the gap between stimulus and response in which we can foster greater self-awareness, resilience, and mental and emotional agility. These, in turn, enable us to undertake the journey from surviving to thriving - a shift from being stuck in the survival mode governed by our limbic brain, towards a more conscious, less reactive and more fulfilling life above the resilience baseline.
