Are anxiety and stress the same thing?

Stress and anxiety overlap but have important differences:

Stress: a response to an identifiable external stressor — a deadline, a conflict, an overwhelming workload. It produces a feeling of pressure, irritability, and fatigue. It tends to ease once the stressor is resolved or removed. In moderate doses, it is adaptive.

Anxiety: a state of apprehension and fear that often has no clear external cause, or persists beyond what the situation would justify, or anticipates future problems that may never happen. It can show up with no identifiable stressor at all. It tends to persist even after the objective problems are resolved.

In practice, stress and anxiety often coexist and feed each other: chronic stress can trigger an anxiety disorder in vulnerable people, and anxiety makes stress harder to manage.

Signs it might be more anxiety than stress: worries persist or shift to other topics even after problems are resolved, you worry about hypothetical situations that rarely or never happen, you have frequent physical symptoms (tension, heart palpitations) with no physical cause, or the level of worry seems out of proportion to the actual situation.