Measuring stress
What causes stress?
Overwhelm : The demands of a task are higher than your abilities. This leads to “burnout” in the long term.
Under-challenged : Your skills are significantly higher than the requirements of the task. In the long term, this leads to a “bore-out”.
HOW IS STRESS PROCESSED?
Stress and stress processing are essential mechanisms of vitality for humans. Vitality is the ability to cope with physical and mental stress individually.
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Stress usually builds up during the day and is then processed again at night. When you get up in the morning after a restful night, the measured stress level will be relatively low (unless you measure immediately after getting up - in this case the ringing of an alarm clock could trigger an immediate stress reaction).
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For working people, it usually happens that the stress level increases during the working week and then decreases again on the weekend.
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If stress processing is inadequate or the stress stimuli are continuously extremely high, the stress level rises to a plateau. If this is not reduced over a long period of time, there are serious health consequences.
WHAT DOES STRESS LEAD TO?
Long-term stress can lead to a variety of illnesses and physical ailments, such as:
- high blood pressure
- Cardiac arrhythmias
- Heart attack
- Heart failure
- Coronary diseases
- diabetes
- Immune diseases
- Inflammatory processes
- psychosomatic disorders
- Burnout
- Anxiety disorders
- and many more
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GOALS OF STRESS MEASUREMENT
Of course, your stress measurement is not just an end in itself, but also:
- detecting the stressful situation
- assessing the ability to recover
- assessing the processing of stressors
- avoiding overuse (burn out)
- becoming aware of your individual life situation (living more consciously)
- implementing targeted interventions to reduce stress
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HOW DOES STRESS MEASUREMENT WORK?
Measuring your stress level takes 3 minutes and consists of 2 parts:
- In the first phase, the rest phase , your heart rate variability is measured. A greater variability in the heart rate indicates a more vital and healthy current state ( David Dapra: The variability of the heart rate , page 5)
- In the second phase, the breathing phase , it is calculated how quickly your heart rate adapts to the changed breathing rate. This adjustment occurs through the parasympathetic nervous system , the part of your autonomic nervous system that is responsible for recovery. The faster the parasympathetic nervous system reacts, the less strain your organism is under.