Knowing the Difference Between Stress and Anxiety Helps You Learn to Cope

WHEN YOU FEEL overwhelmed or worried about something, you probably don’t stop to figure out about whether you’re stressed or anxious. Both feelings are common and can affect your daily life—but experts say it’s not all that important to know the difference.

“People often experience distress, and they don’t know how to put it into words,” says Elizabeth Hoge, M.D., director of the Anxiety Disorders Research Program at Georgetown University Medical Center. But constant stress or anxiety is “not a natural condition for human beings to live in.”

Still, so many people struggle with it. In 2024, 43 percent of adults said they’re feeling more anxious than the year before, and 53 percent said stress was affecting their mental health, according to the American Psychiatric Association’s 2024 mental health poll. They cited their health and current events, including politics, the economy, gun violence, and climate change, as the main reasons.

There can be a fine line between stress and anxiety. Understanding the difference between the two can help you learn the most effective ways to cope.

What’s the difference between stress and anxiety?

STRESS REFERS TO the body and brain’s response to an external experience or situation, Dr. Hoge says. This might include having too much work or dealing with a sick child. Stress often goes away when the issue resolves.

“People often talk about stress colloquially as synonymous with anxiety,” says Lily Brown, Ph.D., director at the Center for the Treatment and Study of Anxiety at the University of Pennsylvania. “But what they’re talking about is any kind of psychological reaction to an external pressure.”

This differs from anxiety, which refers to the “anticipation about the possibility that something bad could happen,” Dr. Brown says.

So it makes sense that you’d use the terms stress and anxiety interchangeably, Dr. Hoge says. One can trigger the other, and you could be dealing with both at the same time. And when you’re worried or feeling distressed, it probably doesn’t matter to you which you have, she adds.

Both stress and anxiety can cause sleep problems, worry, uneasiness, tension, and high blood pressure, according to the National Institute of Mental Health.

Anxiety Can Be a Diagnosis

Another difference is that anxiety can be a diagnosable condition, whereas stress isn’t, Dr. Brown explained.

Anxiety disorders, including panic disorder, social anxiety disorder, or generalized anxiety disorder, are defined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5). To diagnose these conditions, Dr. Hoge says clinicians consider the “severity, intensity, and interference with functioning”—so the anxiety often doesn’t go away and affects someone’s daily life.

“What’s tricky is that everybody can have anxiety, but when you have anxiety plus functional impairment, then you might have an anxiety disorder,” Dr. Brown says. “Conversely, there is no diagnosis that a person would get on the basis of stress alone.”

Does knowing the difference between stress and anxiety matter?

WHEN YOU’RE WORRIED, upset, or overwhelmed, Dr. Brown says, it’s “probably not that important for people to distinguish the two experiences.”

But it is important to notice now it’s affecting your life.

When it’s impacting your job or at-home functioning, interfering with your sleep, and causing relationship problems, it’s worth talking to a therapist or doctor who will help make the distinction, possibly offer an anxiety diagnosis, and recommend treatment, Dr. Hoge says.

It’s also important to note that not all stress or anxiety is bad, and humans are designed to handle certain levels of both, she adds. For instance, if you’re given extra work, but it’s something you feel you can handle, it may be stressful, but it’s good stress that could help you achieve goals. The stress will also probably go away when you complete the project.

What’s harmful about stress and anxiety is how you react to it—such as by lashing out at others or obsessing over the issue—not the stressor or anxiety-inducing situation itself, Dr. Brown says.

How to Cope With Stress and Anxiety

CHRONIC STRESS AND anxiety have been linked to several health conditions, including insomnia, high blood pressure, heart disease, substance abuse, and more. So learning how to cope with it is crucial. Here are some tips:

Build awareness

Trying to eliminate or reduce the things that are causing stress and anxiety is a good first step. But that’s not always doable.

Dr. Brown suggests building awareness around mood-dependent behavior, which is when you start to notice what actions you typically take based on your emotions to get rid of the anxiety. Those behaviors may make you feel better temporarily, but they can make you feel worse in the long term.

“We try to coach them to do the opposite of what the anxiety or the other emotions are telling them to do—and that’s usually the path to help for people,” she says.

Stay active

Exercise triggers the release of endorphins, which help lighten your mood. It can also help you sleep, which will help reduce stress and anxiety.

Dr. Hoge said several studies have specifically linked physical activity to lower stress and anxiety.

Research suggests that physical activity can curb the negative association between stress and poor well-being. Another study found that people who exercise more frequently have a lower perceived level of psychological stress, and exercise helps actually reduce stress.

Seek treatment

There’s no specific timeframe for how long you should try to handle your stress or anxiety yourself before seeking treatment. Do so whenever it becomes burdensome or affects your ability to function normally, Dr. Hoge says. She recommends starting with your primary care doctor, who can rule out some medical conditions that can cause anxiety, such as thyroid conditions, and refer you to a therapist.

“That functional impairment is usually the metric that we encourage people to use in deciding whether they should get the treatment,” Dr. Brown says.

The “gold standard treatment” for anxiety-related disorders is cognitive behavioral therapy, she says. CBT helps “support a person in approaching things that make them anxious” and emphasizes changing harmful thoughts and behavioral patterns, Dr. Brown says.

“I always encourage folks to approach therapy as an opportunity for self-improvement, rather than seeing it as a sign of weakness,” she says.