How to measure psychological stress

I have been working as a corporate EAP consultant for 7 years and have been exposed to thousands of stress assessment cases. To be honest, there is no measuring tool for psychological stress that can produce accurate values ​​with one clip like a thermometer can measure body temperature. The current relatively reliable method is to cross-check information from the three dimensions of subjective feelings, physiological reactions, and behavioral changes, so as to obtain a judgment closest to the real situation.

Last month, a young man working in R&D came to me and said that he had been suffering from insomnia recently and could not fall asleep until two or three o'clock. I first asked him to fill out the Perceptual Stress Scale (PSS), and his score was 12 points higher than the critical value. I then checked his smart watch data for the past three months, and his resting heart rate was higher than before. The baseline value was eight times higher, and HRV (Heart Rate Variability) dropped by nearly 30%. I asked some indirect questions from his colleagues in the same department, and they said that he had even played his favorite weekly basketball game in the past half month. With the three pieces of information together, it was basically certain that his stress level had reached a level that required intervention.

Don’t think this method is too troublesome. The academic community has also thought about setting up a “single gold standard” before. At first, some people said that it would be convenient and low-cost to use a scale, but gradually they discovered a lot of loopholes: some people are naturally careless, and they have been working hard for a month, and the project is about to be scrapped. When filling out the scale, they still feel, “I don’t have much pressure.” This is a typical example of slow perception of stress.； There are also people who have anxiety traits themselves. They feel like the sky is falling at the slightest thing, and their scores on the scale are falsely high. In fact, they are just emotionally sensitive, not really overloaded with stress.

Later, some people said that relying on physiological data can’t deceive people, right? For example, measuring the cortisol level in saliva in the morning, or wearing an EEG cap to see the activation level of the prefrontal lobe. Even many smart watches now have a stress monitoring function, which essentially calculates changes in HRV. But there are bugs, too. I met a girl before who had just drank two glasses of iced Americano before she came for a stress test. The cortisol test showed that her cortisol was alarmingly high. In fact, it wasn’t the stress at all, it was the caffeine. If you stayed up late the day before to watch a TV series, or were in your menstrual period, the physiological data would be inaccurate, so you can’t trust it all.

So now when we do first-line assessments, we will regard inconspicuous behavioral changes as important reference signals. You don’t need to tell yourself, have you suddenly smoked twice as much cigarettes recently than before? Have you always forgotten to order the takeaway you always had before? Do you always get angry when talking to your colleagues? These details are more honest than scales and cold numerical values. Last year, there was a department manager of an Internet company. His stress level had just reached the critical value and his physiological data showed no major problems. However, his assistant mentioned to me that he had been sitting in the car for half an hour before going upstairs after get off work for three consecutive weeks. I knew that his stress was almost unbearable. When we talked about it later, it turned out that the department was laying off employees and he had to meet KPIs to protect his subordinates. He was holding on and didn't want others to see it, so he kept it all in his heart.

The academic community is still arguing. Many scholars doing basic research think that more accurate biomarkers should be introduced. For example, the level of certain inflammatory factors in the blood can be used to judge stress. The accuracy can reach more than 90%. However, we think it is too unrealistic for those on the front line. Whoever wants to measure stress has to draw a tube of blood, right? On the contrary, many companies now equip employees with smart bracelets, coupled with a simple self-evaluation every half month, combined with abnormal behavior feedback from department HR, it is enough to screen out most people who are overloaded with stress.

In fact, for ordinary people, there is no need to worry about the question "How much stress do I have?" Stress is like a backpack on your back. How many things are loaded will it sink? Your own feelings always come first. If you feel tired recently and don't want to do anything, even if all the measured values ​​are normal, it's time to stop and take a rest.