Is it Fear or Anxiety ?

The main function of fear and anxiety is to act as a signal of danger, threat, or motivational conflict and to trigger appropriate adaptive responses. Fear and anxiety often occur together, but these terms are not interchangeable. A key difference between fear and anxiety rests in the nature of the threat, as well as the physiological elements of experiencing the two distinct emotions.

• Nature, Source and Coping-

Dr. David Barlow in his book explains that “Fear is a primitive alarm in response to present danger, characterized by strong arousal and action tendencies”. Anxiety, on the other hand, was defined as “a future oriented emotion, characterized by perceptions of uncontrollability and unpredictability over potentially aversive events and a rapid shift in attention to the focus of potentially dangerous events or one’s own affective response to these events”.

Fear is unlearned as in it’s a primary emotion which has been inbuilt within us since the day, we were born on the other hand Anxiety is a subjective experience of how an individual perceives his situations, event, thoughts and feelings as unpredictable and uncontrollable which could possibly threaten their existence.

Ohman (2008) differentiate fear and anxiety based on ‘Coping’ fear occurs when individuals are actively coping with a perceived threat, whereas anxiety results from a threatening situation without an effective means of coping. People who are more prone to anxiety have avoidance coping mechanisms.

• The Physiological response-

Fear is mostly associated with Fight, Flight and Freeze response in which you are constantly performing risk assessments of the situation you are in mean while Anxiety responses are around Worrying, feeling jittery, nonspecific fright, rising Apprehension Restlessness, trembling and voice quivering, cardiovascular excitation to enhance arousal, arousal or focus on self. Anxiety can manifest differently in everyone.

As such there are different part of limbic system (Centre of our Emotions and Memory) in our brain which contribute to experiencing Fear or Anxiety.

• Duration of Arousal-

In fear the duration of arousal because of threat provoking stimulus is Brief but in Anxiety it can be sustained for a longer period.