psychological stress gauge

There is no universal psychological stress meter that can 100% match your true state, but if you can find a scale that suits your life scenario, it will be a self-observation tool that is 10 times more reliable than emotional internal consumption.

When I was working on three parallel projects last year, I saved three stress assessment forms from different organizations on my mobile phone desktop. On Monday, the test showed "mild stress can be adjusted by yourself." On Wednesday, I worked overtime until 2 o'clock and took another test with the screen full of unfinished plans. It jumped directly to "severe stress stress". I asked for medical treatment.” I received my quarterly bonus on Friday and drank the hand-drew I had been thinking about for a week in the afternoon. After the test, I returned to “completely normal and in an excellent mental state.” At that time, I really felt that this thing was a pure IQ tax - what was measured was not stress at all, but my current blood sugar level, right?

Later, when I talked about this matter with seniors in the industry, I realized that different schools have great differences on the "standardized psychological stress scale". Practitioners of the clinical psychology school mostly recognize scales supported by normative data, such as the PSS Stress Perception Scale and the SAS Anxiety Self-Assessment Scale that you can often search for, both of which have been verified by hundreds of thousands of samples. If your score exceeds the warning line for a week in a row, even if you feel "just a little tired and nothing is wrong," you should pay attention to physiological signals. I had a visitor from the Internet industry whose PSS score had been above 38 for three consecutive weeks. He even said with a smile, "I just haven't slept much recently. How can young people not stay up late?" However, within a week, he went to the emergency room due to premature beats. The doctor checked and said that there was no organic problem, but that the body was unable to bear the pressure due to overload.

However, a friend who practices postmodern short-term therapy does not agree with this set of standards at all. She often says that "the pressure gauge with a unified scale is the self-deception of lazy people." After all, everyone's stress threshold is very different: some people answer 12 customer complaint calls a day, and even after hanging up the line, they can hum a song and order milk tea with double pearls; some people answer 3 work calls a day and their palms are sweating, and they get panicked when their mobile phones ring. Using the same set of scoring standards, the "normal state" of the former is already at the critical point of collapse for the latter, and there is no reference at all.

Don't tell me, there are many people around me who have already jumped out of the limitations of standardized scales and made themselves "personalized psychological stress scales". Last week, I had dinner with a friend who works in operations. She took out her mobile phone and showed me her memo. The scales were all the details of life that only she could understand: 0 points means being able to stop by a flower shop for 10 minutes to pick out sunflowers on the way home from work, 3 points means being unable to laugh while watching funny short videos, 5 points being unable to finish even half a cup of her favorite iced American, 7 points being unable to resist biting her nails and picking the edges of her fingers with small cuts, and 10 points being wanting to scold the car next to her that was changing lanes while driving. As long as she touches the 5-point line now, she will take the initiative to ask her boss for half a day off to watch old cartoons at home. For more than half a year, she has not had the migraine that was so painful that she had to take painkillers.

Of course, don’t take the score on the scale too seriously, and don’t just apply the 10 test questions randomly found in the short video. I took a "stress test" last month, and one of the questions was "Have you always wanted to eat heavy-flavored food recently?" During that time, I was just craving Chongqing hot pot, and I ate it for three days in a row. After taking the test according to the questions, I was directly diagnosed with "severe depressive tendency", which almost scared the hairy belly out of my hand. There is also a little girl I met when I was doing science popularization in college. She came to me crying with a scale and asked me if her score was almost 9 points and she was going to collapse. After asking for a long time, I found out that she was applying for graduate school at the same time, organizing a club change, and planning a graduation trip with her boyfriend. Everything was piled up. We are really busy together, but everything has positive feedback. The high pressure caused by this "sweet burden" is not the same as the pressure of going to the grave every day and being PUAed by the boss. There is no need to force it down. Just adjust the time arrangement and slow down for two days and it will be smooth.

To put it bluntly, the psychological stress gauge is never a verdict for your psychological problems, it is just a small thermometer that you carry with you. Don't measure your own body temperature by measuring the temperature of an industrial boiler, and don't insist on saying "I'm fine, I can handle it" when it's clearly burning to 39 degrees - the scale that suits you is the most accurate.