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In the previous post, Can I Control My Anxiety? – Part 1, I mentioned I’d be talking about two primary points: The difference between stress and anxiety, and the different types of anxiety that typically effect women and girls. Let’s start with the first point.
Stress vs. Anxiety
The terms stress and anxiety have become synonymous, and most people don’t know the difference. You’ve probably said “I’m so stressed out” when you feel anxious, and “I have anxiety” when you’re experiencing stress. Nearly everyone mixes up the two. I’m going to quote a few sources below to help you understand the difference between stress and anxiety, but for the most part it’s pretty simple:
Stress is your body’s response to a challenge, threat, or difficulty. Anxiety is your mental and physical reaction to stress.
Something happens outside you. A situation, an event, an obstacle, and you feel stress in your body. That’s natural. Let’s say two people are fighting and arguing in front of you, you’re bound to feel a stress response in your body. If you’ve got a deadline to meet for a majorly important project at work, you’re probably going to feel stressed. When a final exam, job interview, or change in life circumstances comes up, you can expect stress to make an appearance, too. Stress is the natural response your body has to these things. It’s like your body’s way of preparing you to face the challenge or obstacle, or run away if it’s actually dangerous.
Anxiety is a result of stress. It happens when you don’t have the resources to handle a stressful situation or circumstance, or when you just believe you don’t have the resources (but you actually do). Anxiety shows up in negative thoughts and beliefs about yourself or the world, negative feelings like dread, apprehension, or panic, and negative physical symptoms like I discussed in the previous post (Can I Control My Anxiety? – Part 1.) And remember, negative doesn’t always mean bad. If you’re feeling anxious and thinking anxious thoughts, the first thing to do is wonder “why?” Anxiety can be your friend when it’s a giant red flag, or gut feeling, that’s telling you something’s wrong. Ignoring your built-in warning system is not going to serve you well.
Hopefully you’re starting to understand that anxiety and stress can be both helpful and harmful. The helpful kinds of stress and anxiety happen when you’re facing a challenge and you get the jolt of energy you need to get through it. Think of someone who wants to run a long-distance race and trains her body to accomplish the goal. If she has never engaged in running before, her body is going to feel the stress in muscle/joint fatigue as her mind works to overcome thoughts of “this is hard” and “I’m tired, I don’t want to run anymore.” Eventually that anxiety will translate into thoughts like “I can do this” and “Look at me, I’m running!” if she sticks to it and runs her race.
And again, because I like to quote her, here’s another excerpt from Lisa Damour’s (2019) book:
Stress gets a bad rap. Though people don’t always enjoy being stretched to new limits, both common sense and scientific research tell us that the stress of operating beyond our comfort zones helps us grow. Healthy stress happens when we take on new challenges, such as giving a speech to a large audience, or do things that feel psychologically threatening, such as finally confronting a hostile peer. Pushing ourselves past familiar limits builds our capacities in the same way that runners prepare for marathons by gradually extending the distances at which they train (p. 4)
Stress and anxiety only become unhealthy when they’re toxic or chronic. Toxic stress is the kind that hangs around and doesn’t let up. Your body doesn’t reset itself after the threat or difficulty passes, and you start to become hyper-vigilant, always anticipating danger. You begin losing sleep and doing things to cope that aren’t healthy. People who grow up in abusive or neglectful environments often have toxic stress because they could never relax as adolescents or teens. Similarly, living in an abusive or unhappy home as an adult is just as damaging. When you must walk around on eggshells for fear of setting off a family member or friend, it’s going to create constant stress.
Anxiety is unhealthy when it interferes with your ability to do things or live a meaningful life. Anxiety disorders are the most common mental health disorders in the U.S. with women and girls being more likely to be diagnosed with an anxiety disorder than men or boys. Despite these facts, less than half of all people with an anxiety disorder receive treatment. (sources: anxiety most common, females more likely.)
Common Types of Anxiety in Women and Girls
Although anxiety is normal for everyone, there are particular types of anxiety people who identify as female are inclined to experience.
Your Role as Mother
Should I stay home with my young children, or put them in daycare so I can work, too? Granted, that’s usually a question for women who have the privilege of asking it. Single mothers don’t always have that luxury. No matter the financial position, though, there’s a significant amount of pressure put on women who are mothers. Are you raising your kids right? Do you breast feed or not? Are you harming your child by giving too much space when he/she is emotional? What about if you border on being a helicopter mom when your child is facing difficulties at school? Or what if being a mother is way more than you ever understood, and you’re feeling burned out and sometimes don’t want to be in this mother role? Can you share that with anyone who won’t judge you so you can work through those feelings in a healthy way? As a practicing psychotherapist, I can tell you the role of mother is important in the life of any child, but that doesn’t mean it all falls on women. Men need to be nurturers, too. The mother role isn’t confined to females, but that’s what dominant culture tells us, so that’s what we too often believe. Society also frowns when women have moments of regret or exhaustion tied up in their role as mothers, and that makes it hard for women to admit when they feel defeated or lost.
Your Role as Non-Mother
Whatever your circumstances or reasons, if you identify as female and reach a certain age, there are lots of looks and questions and judgments if you don’t have kids. People wonder why you aren’t a mother, and often think it’s their business to ask. It can also be very difficult to maintain the same friendships you have with other women when they become mothers and you do not. A unique type of anxiety occurs in that space of being female, having no children, and struggling to accept the situation for what it is, or struggling to justify your non-mother role to friends, family, or strangers who have no business asking you about it.
Your Changing Hormones
I think every girl and woman has at least a few horror stories related to their periods. I’ll share one of mine. I was chosen to be the honorary guest at a charity motorcycle ride to benefit a children’s advocacy center. I rode on the back of someone’s motorcycle at the front of a huge pack of riders, and it was quite a long ride till we arrived at the endpoint for food, fun, and fundraising. Having been asked to give some remarks during the festivities, I was horrified when I dismounted the motorcycle and realized that my period had come unexpectedly. I texted my best friend to meet me in the bathroom, and we were both in problem-solving mode because my pants were ruined. Unless I could somehow manage to wrap my lower body in a blanket and make it look fashionable, there was no hiding what happened to my jeans. They were destroyed. My friend and I said quick goodbyes to the charity organizers and shared period war stories all the way back home. I remember telling another friend about what happened later that week, and she replied, “UGH! Periods ruin everything!”
Indeed. Amusing, yet horrifying.
Menstruation doesn’t just mess with your jeans, though. It can also cause more anxiety than normal when your hormones drop and deplete and surge and go back again. Sleep disruption, lots of physical discomfort, and muscle tension – that all leads to more anxiety. Then there’s perimenopause and menopause, each phase disrupting your body and mind in very specific ways. And some studies have shown that women have a particular Anxiety Sensitivity, or AS. Women with high AS are more likely to have extreme fear of physical symptoms of anxiety, seeking to avoid anxiety altogether, as we believe that experiencing anxiety will lead to dire medical consequences like heart attack or stroke (source: Anxiety Sensitivity.)
Your thyroid also produces hormones, and anxiety or panic attacks can accompany thyroid problems. That’s why when women and girls get anxiety out of the blue and don’t have anything they can pinpoint as the cause, I always refer them to a doctor to rule out medical issues like a thyroid disorder. There’s no sense in treating someone for mental health symptoms only if the cause is a medical issue. It’s best to treat the medical issue first and then work on coping skills for good mental health.
Your Body Image
Body image is an entire blog series unto itself, so I’m going to save most of my points for that series coming up in August. In the meantime, let’s just acknowledge that girls and women face increasing pressure from the dominant culture to look a certain way. The messages thrown at you to be thin enough, curvy enough, pretty enough, or strong and toned enough, are never-ending. Movies, TV, magazines, health club ads, social media posts, family talk, church sermons, and on and on. Wherever you are, there’s someone or something telling you how you should look. And it’s aimed at women and girls far more than men and boys.
Your Sexual Self
Dominant culture still perpetuates myths about the sexuality of girls and women. You’re often made to believe you can’t have sexual desires without being promiscuous, you can’t dress in an attractive way without inviting unwanted male attention, or you can’t do or say anything sexual without facing social consequences that are not equally applied to men and boys. Religious or not, there’s a significant social stigma attached to women and girls who don’t adhere to a “purity culture” standard. This creates severe anxiety that keeps women and girls from expressing their sexuality in healthy ways, not to mention crippling fear that you’re somehow less lovable if you do express your sexuality.
In the next post, I’ll talk about ways to manage anxiety and stress, signs that may indicate you have an anxiety disorder, different treatments available for anxiety disorders, and how to counteract the types of anxiety specific to women and girls discussed above. And we have a guest blogger contributing to this series, too! Her post about using essential oils to help manage anxious feelings will be available for reading soon.
Damour, L. (2019). Under pressure: Confronting the epidemic of stress and anxiety in girls. New York: Ballantine Books.
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