Both anxiety and depression are two of the problems that mental health encounters most frequently. After all, both emotional and work overload and mood disorders affect millions of people and can manifest themselves in practically any type of life situation.
However, it is also true that it is not always easy, for the person who is not an expert on the subject, to know how to recognize the symptoms of one alteration or another. In this article we will see, as indicative information, what are the main differences between anxiety and depression two psychological states with the capacity to make us suffer a lot, although in different ways.
In order to detect the typical characteristics of anxiety and depression, take the following keys as a reference.
1. The degree of motivation
People with depression often experience a symptom known as avolition. Apathy is, fundamentally, the absence of desire to do things, of initiative. That is to say, in the main variants of depression, whoever suffers from this state does not feel motivated to do anything even if you are proposed to carry out activities that are apparently fun and do not require effort.
On the other hand, people who experience anxiety do not meet the previous characteristic. It is possible that their state of mental exhaustion makes them more likely to get tired quickly, but on many occasions they have problems resting and, instead, they try to find entertainment to keep themselves busy and not have to think about what is happening to them. worries.
The causes of anxiety can respond to an almost infinite variety of factors that, by being present in our daily lives, lead us towards this state: lack of sleep, substance abuse, certain social or economic problems, etc
Depression, on the other hand, frequently appears endogenously , without there being a clear cause to explain it. When the onset of symptoms coincides with a specific event, this is usually punctual, and the simple passage of time does not have to cause the “return to normal” to make depression disappear.
3. The presence or absence of worries
People with anxiety are characterized by remaining in a state of almost constant worry. Rumination, which is the habit of thinking about the same thought all the time (no matter how negative it may be) is a vicious circle from which they can hardly escape.
This is because the reason for anxiety is keep us on alert very useful when there is some danger but, if it becomes chronic, it causes problems.
In depression, however, there are few concerns, or almost none at all, in the most severe cases. These types of disorders are not an extension of an evolutionary useful activation mechanism, but rather their origin is much more mysterious and, at the moment, little is known about it.
The feeling of discomfort experienced in depression has to do not so much with the awareness that there is danger nearby but, on the contrary, with a feeling of melancholy and losing reasons to get out of bed.
Another of the most important differences between depression and anxiety is that people with depression they often lose the ability to enjoy , even if it is not a psychological pleasure but more linked to physical stimulation. This is a symptom known as anhedonia.
People with anxiety, on the other hand, do not present anhedonia, although it is true that their ability to enjoy themselves can also be impaired due, among other things, to the fact that it is difficult for them to stop thinking about what worries them, on the one hand, since their physical condition is not optimal, on the other hand, due to the wear and tear they suffer on a daily basis due to lack of sleep or poor management of work times.
In depression, then, this inability to feel pleasure is rather endogenous, given that there are imbalances in the levels of neurotransmitters and in the activation patterns of specific parts of the brain. However, in anxiety, although there are also changes in the nervous system, the causes of these difficulties in enjoying have more to do with the constant state of alert, that is, it depends on the interaction with the environment.
5. Degree of predisposition towards meeting goals
Neither depression nor anxiety are states in which people are oriented toward achieving goals. However, the lack of this predisposition is much more pronounced and noticeable in the case of depressive disorders.
In anxiety, we often postpone those tasks that can lead us towards resolving what worries us, since the simple idea of facing that task again scares us. However, the most common thing is that, once work has started, everything flows more normally.
In depression, however, We don’t even consider if there is something we should do : It is as if obligations ceased to exist. In fact, if you aspire to anything, it is to relive the moments in which depression had not appeared. This is because while people with anxiety think a lot about the future, for those patients who have depression nothing matters more than the present situation.
