ASSESSMENT: Your Stress Response Style Revealed
Part Two, “Your Cells Are Listening to Your Thoughts,” offers insights into how you experience stress and how you can shift that experience to be healthier for your telomeres and more beneficial in your daily life. To get you started, here’s a quick self-test. It assesses your underlying sources of stress reactivity and stress resilience, some of which have been linked to telomere length.
Think of a situation that bothers you a great deal and that is ongoing in your life. (If you cannot think of a current situation, think of your most recent difficult problem.) Circle your numerical response to each question.
1. When you think about dealing with this situation, how much do you feel hope and confidence vs. feelings of fear and anxiety?
| 0 hopeful, confident |
1 | 2 same amount of each |
3 | 4 fearful, anxious |
2. Do you feel you have whatever it takes to cope effectively with this situation?
| 4 not at all |
3 | 2 somewhat |
1 | 0 extremely |
3. How much are you caught up in repetitive thoughts about this situation?
| 0 not at all |
1 | 2 somewhat |
3 | 4 extremely |
4. How much do you avoid thinking about the situation or try not to express negative emotions?
| 0 not at all |
1 | 2 somewhat |
3 | 4 extremely |
5. How much does this situation make you feel bad about yourself?
| 0 not at all |
1 | 2 somewhat |
3 | 4 extremely |
6. How much do you think about this situation in a positive way, seeing some good that could come from it, or telling yourself statements that feel comforting or helpful, such as that you are doing the best you can?
| 4 not at all |
3 | 2 somewhat |
1 | 0 extremely |
TOTAL SCORE (Add up the numbers; notice questions 2 and 6 are positive responses so the scale is reversed.)
The point of this informal test (not a validated research measure) is to raise awareness of your own tendencies to respond in a certain way to chronic stress. It is not a diagnostic scale. Also know that if you’re dealing with a severe situation, your response style score will naturally shift to be higher. This is not a pure measure of response style, because our situations and our responses inevitably get a bit mixed together.
Total score of 11 or under: Your stress style tends to be healthy. Instead of feeling threatened by stress, you tend to feel challenged by it, and you limit the degree to which the situation spills over into the rest of your life. You recover quickly after an event. This stress resilience is positive news for your telomeres.
Total score of 12 or over: You’re like most of us. When you’re in a stressful situation, the power of that threat is magnified by your own habits of thinking. Those habits are linked, either directly or indirectly, to shorter telomeres. We’ll show you how to change those habits or soften their effects.
Here’s a closer look at the habits of mind associated with each question:
Questions 1 and 2: These questions gauge how threatened you feel by stress. High fear combined with low coping resources turn on a strong hormonal and inflammatory stress response. Threat stress involves a set of mental and physiological responses that can, over time, endanger your telomeres. Fortunately, there are ways to convert threat stress into a feeling of challenge, which is healthier and more productive.
Question 3: This item assesses your level of rumination. Rumination is a loop of repetitive, unproductive thoughts about something that’s bothering you. If you’re not sure how often you ruminate, now you can start to notice. Most stress triggers are short-lived, but we humans have the remarkable ability to give them a vivid and extended life in the mind, letting them fill our headspace long after the event has passed. Rumination, also known as brooding, can slip into a more serious state known as depressive rumination, which includes negative thoughts about oneself and one’s future. Those thoughts can be toxic.
Question 4: This one’s about avoidance and emotion suppression. Do you avoid thinking about the stressful situation or avoid sharing feelings about it? Is it so emotionally loaded that the thought of it makes your stomach clench? It’s natural to try to push difficult feelings away, but although this strategy may work in the short term, it doesn’t tend to help when the situation is chronic.
Question 5: This question addresses “ego threat.” Does it feel as if your pride and personal identity could be damaged if the stressful situation doesn’t go well? Does the stress trigger negative thoughts about yourself, even to the extent that you feel worthless? It’s normal to have these self-critical thoughts sometimes, but when they are frequent, they throw the body into an overly sensitive, reactive state characterized by high levels of the stress hormone cortisol.
Question 6: This question asks whether you’re able to engage in positive reappraisal, which is the ability to rethink stressful situations in a positive light. Positive reappraisal lets you take a less than ideal situation and turn it to your benefit or at least take the sting out of it. This question also measures whether you tend to offer yourself some healthy self-compassion.
If the assessment revealed that you struggle with your stress responses, take heart. It’s not always possible to change your automatic response, but most of us can learn to change our responses to our responses—and that’s the secret sauce of stress resilience. Now let’s get to work understanding how stress affects your telomeres and cells, and how you can make changes that will help protect them.