SMARTx HEALTH

Stress Levels

 

One of the tricky things about stress is how hard it is to really measure. The same event could have two totally different effects on different people: maybe you have no problem at all driving on the freeway but your friend absolutely hates it and spends the whole time stressed to the max. For an amateur gym rat, squatting 200 pounds might be a big physiological stress, but for a trained powerlifter, 200 pounds not be a significant physical stress at all.

Just having stressful events in your life isn’t necessarily a problem. Stress is just something that challenges your physical or mental stability, and it’s totally possible to experience stress, recover from it, get your groove back, and keep going. Sometimes it even makes you stronger.But if the amount of stress you’re under exceeds your ability to recover, and you’re just accumulating more and more damage without being able to repair it, then there’s a problem.

But how do you know when that’s happening? It’s hard to really get an objective idea of physical + mental stress – some people are really good at ignoring it! Measuring stress can help give you a reality check about your own stress burden, and it can also make the problem of stress management a little less overwhelming. So here are two ways you can get an objective, accurate look at overall stress: blood testing and heart rate variability testing.