How to spot the difference between helpful and unhelpful anxiety
Creating a psychologically healthy organization starts with a better understanding of how anxiety can show up for employees.
Imagine you have a time machine. Set the dial to take you back 50,000 years. Welcome! You’re in a prehistoric time. As you begin a leisurely stroll, you hear rustling in the trees — it’s a grizzly bear. Suddenly, your body and mind react. Your heartbeat quickens, your breath becomes shallow, and you become laser-focused on survival. This is what anxiety feels like, and anxiety did its job. You reacted appropriately and made it safely back to the time machine.
As with most human tendencies, anxiety was influenced by natural selection, meaning that it got stronger because it helped keep people — and their genes — alive. However, in modern times, most situations that trigger anxious feelings are not life-threatening. If we replace the grizzly bear with climate change, economic hardship, social media, or family concerns, we quickly see why nearly 20% of the US adult population experience an anxiety disorder each year.
Additionally, work is a major contributor to feelings of anxiety. The good news is that benefits teams are giving more attention to mental health than ever before. However, understanding anxiety is not always straightforward. That’s why creating a psychologically healthy workplace starts with a better understanding of the various ways anxiety may show up for employees, common signs of anxiety, and understanding what care options are best for a specific population.
Are anxiety, stress, worry, and fear all synonyms?
Before we dive in, we want to clear up some semantic confusion. Stress, worry, and fear are often used interchangeably with anxiety, but they mean different things.
- Stress refers to any event or situation that places a demand on you, which may or may not lead to anxiety.
- Worry is the thinking part of anxiety: imagining future problems and planning ahead to deal with them.
- Fear is the immediate response to a perceived danger in the present, involving a spike in physical arousal that gets the body ready to take action (sometimes called “fight or flight”). Anxiety and fear are closely related, but fear occurs specifically in response to a present threat, whereas anxiety happens in response to threats that are future oriented or undefined.
Common signs of anxiety
As depicted with the grizzly bear example, anxiety changes our thinking, behavior, and physiology. Anxiety looks and feels a little different for everyone, but there are some common signs:
- Anxious thinking: Assuming the worst case scenario, or thinking way ahead about what could go wrong.
- Physical changes: The body mobilizes for action in the form of symptoms like a racing heart, quicker breathing, sweating, shaking, or blushing.
- Increased tension: Fidgeting, pacing, talking over others, repeatedly refreshing email, or becoming irritable.
- Signs of self doubt: Asking for a lot of reassurance, self-criticizing, getting stuck on perfectionistic details, or procrastinating.
- Avoiding or escaping certain situations: Leaving a meeting abruptly, or always declining social invitations.
Anxiety is helpful… until it’s not
Moderate amounts of anxiety can stimulate us, helping us to solve problems and achieve goals. But some anxiety is irrational, overwhelming, or simply not that useful. Let’s compare helpful vs. unhelpful anxiety using some real-world examples:
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During the COVID-19 public health emergency, Sleepio and Daylight are being made available as treatments for insomnia disorder and generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), respectively, without a prescription. Sleepio and Daylight have not been cleared by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the treatment of insomnia disorder and GAD, respectively.
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