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Stressful vs Difficult - What's the difference?

stressful | difficult |

As adjectives the difference between stressful and difficult

is that stressful is irritating; causing stress while difficult is hard, not easy, requiring much effort.

As a verb difficult is

to make difficult; to impede; to perplex.

stressful

English

Adjective

(en adjective)
  • Irritating; causing stress.
    • I have always argued that change becomes stressful and overwhelming only when you've lost any sense of the constancy of your life. You need firm ground to stand on. From there, you can deal with that change. –Richard Nelson Bolles

    Related terms

    * stress

    difficult

    English

    Adjective

    (en adjective)
  • Hard, not easy, requiring much effort.
  • * (Nathaniel Hawthorne) (1804-1864)
    • There is not the strength or courage left me to venture into the wide, strange, and difficult world, alone.
  • * 2008 , Daniel Goleman, Destructive Emotions: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama (ISBN 0307483762), page 199:
    • In adults, the same kind of anger has been studied in people trying to solve a very difficult math problem. Though the tough math problem is very frustrating, there is an active attempt to solve the problem and meet the goal.
  • * {{quote-magazine, date=2013-08-03, volume=408, issue=8847, magazine=(The Economist)
    • , title= Boundary problems , passage=Economics is a messy discipline: too fluid to be a science, too rigorous to be an art. Perhaps it is fitting that economists’ most-used metric, gross domestic product (GDP), is a tangle too.
  • Hard to manage, uncooperative, troublesome.

    • Usage notes

    Difficult'' implies that considerable mental effort or physical skill is required, or that obstacles are to be overcome which call for sagacity and skill in the doer; as, a ''difficult'' task. Thus, "hard" is not always synonymous with difficult: Other examples include ''a ''difficult'' operation in surgery'' and ''a ''difficult'' passage by an author (that is, a passage which is hard to understand).

    Synonyms

    * burdensome, cumbersome, hard * see also

    Derived terms

    * difficultly

    Verb

    (en verb)
  • (obsolete) To make difficult; to impede; to perplex.

    • Statistics

    *

    External links

    * * 1000 English basic words