This was eye opening for me; and not in the way you may think.

It highlights yet another contradiction in society’s stress-management conversation by uncovering a flaw in how we are taught to measure stress. Ultimately, this ends up sabotaging efforts to reduce destructive stress, leverage empowering stress, and better ride the waves of survival stress. 

I never thought about measuring stress before, but that night, I needed answers.

As I spun around in my office chair procrastinating on finalizing my slides for the next night’s keynote speech on resilience, I wondered, how ‘stressful’ was my life when I was in the thick of my burnout?

It’d been eight years since my neurologist suggested I go on disability insurance and told me to reevaluate my expectations for my life. [You can read my story by clicking here for the intro to the Modern Stress Solution.]

I wasn’t clear on the metrics he used to form his recommendation.

Hmm, how does a doctor measure a patient’s stress? There must be a way…  

I stopped spinning and rolled myself to my keyboard – minutes later I was doing a deep dive into research about online stress tests.

‘Calculating’ Mental Health Stress Scores

Unlike physical stress tests which monitor your heart as you run on a treadmill, these tests measure your emotional and mental stress levels.  

The premise is simple.

There’s a long list of potential stressors a person may face. These include money troubles, grief, chronic pain, injuries, moving homes, and relationship loss.

Each issue is assigned a numerical value to indicate its anticipated level of stressfulness. The more stressful a situation is expected to be, the higher the assigned score.

To complete the test simply review the list. For any of the problems which apply to you, write the corresponding stress score. Calculate your total, and – voila – that’s how stressed you are.

Ah, jackpot. This will give me my answer.

I picked one of the online stress tests to complete and got started. I felt like I was back in the 1980s doing a quiz in Seventeen Magazine.

Thinking of everything happening around the time of the dramatic appointment with my neurologist, I completed the quiz.

• Moving homes. Check.
• Changing jobs. Check.
• Financial troubles. Check.
• Romantic break ups. Check. Check.
• Health challenges. Check. Check. Check.
• Family member dying. Check. Check.
• Friend dying. Check. Check. Check. Check.
• Injuries. Check times eight.

The list continued.

I tallied my total stress score – It was 734.

The legend said if you have a score over 330 seek professional help immediately. By this measure, my neurologist was right; I should have stayed on the couch and lost hope in my future.

No doubt it was a tough time. Those experiences were the inspiration behind my book How to Be Resilient When Life Sucks (originally titled Married My Mom, Birthed A Dog.)

The Flawed Premise Behind Mental Health Stress Tests

Something about the calculation didn’t sit right.

My first reaction was relief. I was happy I didn’t calculate my stress score back then. Those numbers would have discouraged me and dimmed my determination; I would have felt hopeless.

Then I imagined other stories of resilience. What about the heroes who succeeded despite unimaginable, dire circumstances? Surely, they would fail the test, too.

As I looked at my results, my eyes were opened.  

The test was flawed. Perhaps not from a medical perspective – that’s for the doctors to decide. But for those of us outside the formal research realm, there was definitely something amiss from a practical, personal development perspective.

Traditional mental health stress tests are scored based on the volume and type of stressors, without adjusting for the unique circumstances of the individual taking the test.  

This focus on tallying external factors could exaggerate or minimize a person’s stress reality and doesn’t explain why the same issue could be stressful for me, but not stressful for you.

A person may only check two 35-point problems for a total stress score of 70 which is well within the legend’s acceptable stress limits. The calculation could mean their stress is easily dismissed as low risk. Yet, their 70 points could represent an all-consuming stress reality which completely debilitates their life.

This prompted me to ask even more questions about the stressfulness expectations.

• Why can one person go through a ‘stressful’ situation like moving their home, which has a high rating on the stress test, and be cool as a cucumber, while another person can be completely consumed and overwhelmed by the process of moving for months?

• Why does a physical injury mean one person will spend weeks on the couch, take time off from work, and complain to every person who will listen, while another person with the same injury is back in the gym the next day working different muscle groups while the injury heals?

• Why does financial hardship force one business owner to be completely stressed and miserable, while another rides with the punches and focuses on finding solutions?

The Two Sides of the Stress Test Equation

It was clear, just because something goes wrong, it doesn’t automatically need to be ‘stressful’ – at least not to the degree the medical community estimates it to be.

This approach focuses destructive stress-reduction efforts on eliminating or fixing the problems causing stress. What’s the plan? Are you just not supposed to ever move homes to avoid stress? Unfortunately, a lot of stressors won’t go away or can’t be fixed.   

Typically, this is the point in the stress conversation when a motivational speaker repeats popular advice such as, ‘It doesn’t matter what happens to you, it matters how you handle it.’

Taking the blame away from the stressor to place the responsibility on the stressee sounds splendid, but this also has a flawed premise – it dismisses reality.

What happens to you does matter. The impact potential stressors have on a person’s stress levels and mental health can’t be ignored.

It also matters how long the stressor happens for, how much you care about it happening, and even why it happened. The stress experience is very different when you move because the bank repossessed your house compared to moving because you’re upgrading your house.

This is the conundrum.

The mainstream conversation around stress reinforces the stress-test way of thinking – we’re taught to make assumptions about stress based on scenarios.

The personal development industry preaches the opposite. Stress is caused by a person’s reaction to those problems, not the problems themselves.

The truth is, you can’t have one without the other. What really matters is the unique way the stressor and the stressee are combined. 

No mental health stress test should be tallied based on external factors without adjusting scores based on a person’s perception of the stressors and their overarching resilience skills. Among the parameters to consider are a person’s objectivity, resourcefulness, life experiences, and overall well-being at the time of encountering the problem, as well as their self-awareness, optimism, and confidence levels in navigating such challenges.

👆 I’d love a statistician to create a test which combines all that.

Putting this Less Assumptive Approach into Action

You may never take a traditional stress test as I did that night in my office. Still, my hope is you’ll see the value in a balanced approach to accessing stress levels by weighing the type of issues and a person’s response to them. It’s not either, or – it’s both.

Other people’s assumptions about the stressfulness of a situation, do not need to shape your stress experience. This is YOUR stress story, not theirs.

When someone declares how stressful a situation is during a conversation, that’s your cue to ask yourself, “What’s my opinion? Is this situation stressful for ME?”

You can read about the damaging effect of overusing the words stress, stressful, and stressed in the third post in the Modern Stress Solution series by clicking this link.

This is a critical consideration in my Stress Design Model which shows you how to reduce destructive stress, harness empowering stress, and better ride the intense waves of survival stress.

All it takes is one simple solution at a time.

What’s Next in the Modern Stress Solution Series

This leads to the next post in the Modern Stress Solution series. I’ll share the reason people stay stressed unnecessarily – and thankfully, your circumstances don’t need to change before you take control of your stress and design a life you love.

In the meantime, if you’re sick of having to be resilient – watch this TV interview I did about ‘coping fatigue.’ It’s a term I coined to describe the exhaustion from continually having to be resilient.