Assess Your Stress

Let’s look at two clinical tools that can be utilized to formally assess your stress.

The Holmes-Rahe Life Stress Inventory is a widely used measure of cumulative life stressors over the preceding year. Higher scores on this measure indicate that you are at increased risk of psychological stress and physical illness.^[1] You can access an online version here and a pdf version here.

To assess more recent stressors, a gold standard clinical tool is The Depression Anxiety Stress Scale (DASS). The DASS is a set of 42 questions with three self-report scales designed to measure the negative emotional states of depression, anxiety, and stress.^[2]

The Depression scale assesses dissatisfaction with life, hopelessness, devaluation of life, self-deprecation, lack of interest/involvement, reduced pleasure, and passivity.

The Anxiety scale assesses autonomic stimulation, skeletal muscle effects, situational anxiety, and subjective experience of anxious affect.

The Stress scale assesses difficulty relaxing, nervous stimulation, and being easily upset/agitated, irritable/over-reactive and impatient.

Subjects are asked to use 4-point severity/frequency scales to rate the extent to which they have experienced each state over the past week. Scores for Depression, Anxiety and Stress are calculated by summing the scores for the relevant items.

You can take the DASS quiz online here. You can also access a fillable pdf of it here^[3] and calculate your score yourself.