Low stress sensitivity

What this means

You scored low on stress sensitivity. Deadlines, delays and difficult conversations reach you, but they do not knock you over. You tend to deal with the problem in front of you instead of rehearsing everything that could go wrong, and your temper stays fairly even when others lose theirs.

Strengths

A steady head in a crisis. People around you often calm down simply because you do. You recover from setbacks quickly, you can make decisions under time pressure, and you are less likely to carry the day's tension into the evening.

Blind spots

Low sensitivity is not immunity. A heavy enough load for long enough wears anybody down, and calm people sometimes notice it late, through poor sleep, headaches or a short fuse, rather than as a feeling of stress. You may also underestimate how hard the same situation is for someone else and read their worry as fuss.

One thing to try

Next time a busy week hits your team, ask one colleague how they are really doing, and listen without offering a fix. Keep the habits that probably help you stay steady, such as sleep, exercise and time off, even when things are going well.

About the quiz: Stress test: how easily do you get stressed?

Some people shrug off a missed bus or a tense meeting in a minute. Others feel it for the rest of the day. Psychologists call this stress sensitivity: a fairly stable tendency in how easily pressure gets to you and how strongly you react to it. It is part of the personality trait known as neuroticism, or emotional stability when seen from the other end.

The test has 18 statements from the public-domain International Personality Item Pool (IPIP). Rate how accurately each one describes you in general, not just this week. It takes about three minutes. You get an overall score and a 0–100 score on three facets: worry, vulnerability under pressure and irritability.

The test does not measure how stressed you are right now, and it does not measure burnout or an anxiety disorder. It is not a diagnosis. If stress is affecting your sleep, health or daily life, talk to your doctor.

How this quiz works

This test combines three short scales from the International Personality Item Pool (IPIP), a public-domain collection of personality items that may be used, translated and published for any purpose. Each facet has six statements: worry (the IPIP-NEO Anxiety facet N1, Goldberg, 1999), vulnerability under pressure (the IPIP-NEO Vulnerability facet N6) and irritability (the IPIP scale for a construct similar to the even-tempered scale of the Six Factor Personality Questionnaire, which IPIP labels Calmness, scored in reverse). Each source scale has ten statements and was shortened to six. All three belong to neuroticism, the broad trait that describes how easily a person experiences negative emotions under strain.

You rate each statement from 1 (very inaccurate) to 5 (very accurate). Nine statements are reverse-keyed, so a 1 counts as a 5. Each facet is averaged and converted to 0–100, and the overall score is the average of all 18 answers on the same scale. An overall score of 40 or below is shown as "low", 41–60 as "average" and above 60 as "high" stress sensitivity. These cut-offs are descriptive, not population norms. Because half of the statements point each way, agreeing with everything puts you in the middle, not at the top.

What it does not do: it does not measure how stressed you are at the moment or how much stress you have had in the past month. It is not a burnout test, it does not screen for anxiety disorders or depression, and it is not a clinical instrument. It describes a fairly stable tendency, which still shifts with age, life events and practice. Like every self-report test, it reflects how you see yourself. If stress affects your sleep, health, work or relationships for weeks, or you feel you cannot cope, see a doctor or a mental health professional. In Estonia, peaasi.ee has reliable information on mental health and on where to find help. In an emergency, call 112 or your local emergency number.

References: Goldberg, L. R. (1999). A broad-bandwidth, public domain, personality inventory measuring the lower-level facets of several five-factor models. In I. Mervielde et al. (Eds.), Personality Psychology in Europe, 7, 7–28. Goldberg, L. R. et al. (2006). The International Personality Item Pool and the future of public-domain personality measures. Journal of Research in Personality, 40, 84–96. Items: ipip.ori.org.