Lesson 1 of 6 · Three things wearing one name
How to tell them apart
Worry is mostly words. It sounds like a voice in your head making plans for things that have not happened. It is quieter in the body than you would expect, and it goes on for hours.
Panic is mostly body. Heart, breath, hands, a feeling that something terrible is happening right now. It comes up fast, it peaks within minutes, and it comes down, even when it feels like it will not.
The fear of being judged has a particular signature. Your attention swings inward. You start watching yourself from the outside, imagining how you are coming across, and then you go home and replay the whole thing for two hours.
What the research says
Worry turns out to be mostly words rather than pictures. That is why it can run for an hour and leave you exhausted without ever feeling like the fear it is made of.
Worry in generalised anxiety disorder was found to be predominantly verbal thought rather than imagery. That is the first signature above, and it is why worry is quieter in the body than it feels like it should be.
Borkovec TD, Inz J (1990). The nature of worry in generalized anxiety disorder: a predominance of thought activity. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 28(2), 153 to 158 doi
Panic attacks recorded as they actually happened, rather than remembered afterwards, peak within minutes. If you are in one, that is the shape of the thing you are inside.
Panic attacks recorded as they happened in daily life rather than reconstructed afterwards. The current diagnostic criterion describes an abrupt surge reaching its peak within minutes.
Margraf J, Taylor CB, Ehlers A, Roth WT, Agras WS (1987). Panic attacks in the natural environment. The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 175(9), 558 to 565 doi
In social anxiety, attention turns inward onto an image of how you imagine you look to other people. That image, rather than the room, is what you are actually reacting to.
Puts self-focused attention, and an image of how you look to an internal audience, at the centre of social anxiety rather than at the edge of it.
Rapee RM, Heimberg RG (1997). A cognitive-behavioral model of anxiety in social phobia. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 35(8), 741 to 756 doi
Going over a social event afterwards is a specific feature of social anxiety rather than something everyone does. It is part of the pattern, not evidence that you handled it badly.
The replay afterwards is a specific feature of socially anxious people rather than something everybody does. It is part of the pattern, not a personal failing.
Rachman S, Gruter-Andrew J, Shafran R (2000). Post-event processing in social anxiety. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 38(6), 611 to 617 doi