What is stress?
Stress is not the same as a fit of the blues, feeling a bit uptight or having a bad day. While some days may be worse than others, stress is something that gets a grip of you and does not let go. You may feel your life is turned upside down by it. You may feel it changes your nature. It often involves:
a range of feelings
anxiety, fear, sadness, panic, guilt, anger and dissatisfied about yourself and your life. You might feel you are easily overwhelmed by life.
a range of thoughts
thoughts about what could go wrong. Thoughts about the way you believe you have screwed things up in your life. Thoughts about being a failure. You may have low self-esteem. You might feel full of doom and gloom about your life.
a range of actions
you avoid places in case something bad happens to you. You escape from places when you feel tense. You slow down. You cry a lot. You drink more. You retreat from life. You try to protect yourself against the world.
a range of body symptoms
you often feel unwell and tense. You lack energy. Your heart races, you get head aches all the time, etc.
As most people see themselves like this, it makes more sense to talk of stress rather than just 'anxiety' or just 'depression'.
These are the 14 most common signs of stress reported by people in Britain:
| worry | panic attacks |
| tiredness | feeling on edge |
| anger | poor concentration |
| poor sleep | unable to switch off |
| feeling worthless | waiting for the worst to happen |
| feeling hopeless | tearful |
| feeling irritable | drinking too much |
How stress relates to other problems
It is unusual to have a single problem, e.g. panic attacks. Most people have a mix of problems - there is a close link between anxiety, panic, depression, poor sleep, and drink/drug problems. Anxiety and depression are very commonly found together.
As you would expect, a mix of problems is usually more severe than single problems.
For many people, anxiety seems to appear first, followed by depression. Alcohol/drug problems may start off, in some, as a way to combat the anxiety - you take a drink to feel more in control. But the drink makes you more tense the next day so you drink more, and so on until the drink is as big a problem as the anxiety with both feeding the other.
