Women have fallen in love with health metrics. First, we tracked our steps and tried hitting 10,000 daily for fitness. Then, realizing that good sleep is essential for our well-being, we monitored our sleep and bought devices and smart beds to tell us how much restful sleep we get each night.
Now we’re focusing on stress. While we‘ve been talking about and trying to manage stress for decades, today‘s technology allows us to not only measure our stress (in a sense) but it also helps determine what causes it, and once we know that, how to help lower it to improve our health and wellness. So tracking stress may be the new tracking steps.
Why stress matters
Decades of research show us that stress can have a profoundly negative impact on both our mental and physical health — affecting everything from our organs to our brain function, gut and mood — so we must take steps to reduce it. Once you track your stress and determine its cause, you’ll need to learn how to head it off at the pass. Otherwise, what’s the point of tracking it? Fortunately, plenty of apps and devices are available to help us accomplish this.
“It’s important to remember that stress isn’t actually a specifically measurable thing within your body. It can be approximated, mostly with heart rate monitors, but that doesn’t always tell the whole story,” says Caroline Grainger, a personal trainer certified by the International Sports Sciences Association at FitnessTrainer.com. “Fitness trackers combined with methods of managing stress, including therapy, medication and adaptive techniques in the moment, can help you identify moments when you’re more successfully managing the stressors in your life.” And the less stress you have, the better for your physical and mental well-being.
How to track your stress
Some of the wearable devices in the stress-tracking space are Whoop, Garmin, Apple Watch, Samsung Health, Oura and Fitbit. Apps include MyLifeLine and Stress Check (iOS) and SWORD Health (iOS and Android).
“Most stress-tracking apps and devices use sensors to measure physiological changes in the body, such as heart rate variability (HRV), skin conductance and breathing rate,” says Zeeshan Afzal, M.D., medical officer at welzo.com, an online telehealth platform in the U.K.
Heart rate variability analysis is one popular method for measuring stress. It involves measuring the time difference between consecutive heartbeats. In essence, it examines how fast your heart beats and how the time between heartbeats changes. This can show how adaptable your body is to stress. For example, people with high HRV are typically less stressed.
In addition, adrenaline and cortisol — two hormones linked to stress — are produced when you’re stressed to provide you with enough energy to deal with the stressor. It’s part of the fight-or-flight response, and it’s why you may feel agitated or anxious when you experience stress. Grainger says that some of these devices and apps also track your heart rate and compare it to your physical activity level using accelerometers. “In most cases, an elevated heart rate in the absence of exercise is a sign of stress,” she says.
Plus, some newer models like the Apple Watch series 6 and the Samsung Active2 Galaxy Watch and Sleep Tracker, which has built-in integration with the Calm app, also use blood oxygen monitoring to sense quick and shallow breathing. Breathing can further indicate stress, anxiety or even a panic attack. These measurements, once taken, are then used to calculate your stress score or stress level. Tracking your stress levels can help you become more aware of how stress affects your body and mind and may help you identify the triggers that lead to stress. The awareness alone can help you make positive changes to reduce stress.
Remember, however, that day-to-day periods of elevated stress are normal — what you should be monitoring and looking to reduce are consistently high levels of stress, which can start to erode your health over time and have been linked to more damaging long-term health outcomes, cautions Dan Gallagher, an ISSA-certified nutritionist at Aegle Nutrition, a U.S.-based nutrition supplement company.