A daily stress test to understand the true source of your stressors

What stresses you at work (and at home) might not be what you think. Take this test to learn more.

When I first started studying stress in the lab, I was shocked at how quickly you can get people’s stress indicators to tick up. We use a task called the Trier, where we have people stand in front of a panel of 3 judges, give a speech on why you’d make a good friend or count backwards in increments of 17, all while receiving nothing but blank stares in return. Intense tasks like these do the trick for a nice temporary stress burst.

But in real life, Triers are rare. Job interviews or bad dates maybe, but most of the time, the stressors feel smaller, and more frequent. Awkward moments during getting-acquainted conversations. A commute that ran late. Construction down the hall from your office, making Zoom meetings impossible.

We deal with these things, move on, and forget how they impact us days later. But often, there’s a “sleeper effect” of stressors on our health; it takes days before the psychological experience of stress impacts your physiology, and in turn, your sleep.

Most of us don’t have a great sense of what’s actually stressing us out. We know what we’re worried about in the morning before work, but it’s often not the anticipated stuff that’s doing the real damage. It’s the stressors that we didn’t plan for. It’s hard to understand your daily stress patterns without collecting data on yourself. To help you, I leveraged insights from stress expert and my long-time collaborator Wendy Berry Mendes and Amie Gordon to develop a daily stress test.

In Job Therapy, I gave this test to a group of people, and here are the key insights.

1. The test requires you to measure what you think will stress you out at the start of the day, and what actually stressed you out at the end of it. About 50% of anticipated stressors were not the biggest stressor of the day.

2. The things that we anticipate as our biggest stressors in the morning often wind up not being that bad. If you can anticipate it, you plan for it.

3. Despite end-of-day reported stressors being “surprises” to people (meaning they didn’t anticipate them in the morning), they aren’t novel. In fact, most people had a lot of experience with them. They simply aren’t good at predicting them, unless prompted to do so.

Here are the ways you can use the test

1. For yourself! Learn your own patterns, and with these data in hand, you can start to make changes to your daily behaviors. If you’re looking for a new job, use your answers during networking conversations to learn what stress triggers you’re likely to encounter at new jobs and in new careers.

2. As a career coach. Help clients identify their patterns of stress so they can identify sources of unhappiness at work.

3. As a leader or manager. Help your people learn what triggers their stress, and have open conversations about it. The best way to improve well-being at work is to have active conversations around daily stressors, and how to make daily changes to reduce them.