Questionnaire: How well do you handle stress?

	Never	Hardly Ever	Sometimes	Often
My mind kept returning to the problem
I did not let myself become upset when I thought about it
I tried to blank it from my mind
It stopped me sleeping or kept waking me up because I worried about it

Self assessment

Going back now to the number of stress points you had for the life events, adjust them in the following way. For every time you answer ‘never’, give yourself a score of 0, for every ‘hardly ever’ give yourself 1, for every ‘sometimes’ give yourself 2 and for every ‘often’ give yourself 3.

If your score is more than 6 for any of the life events you have suffered in the last year, then you should double your score of stress points for that particular event. For example, you may have scored 4 stress points for marital reconciliation following a painful separation the same year. If you often preoccupied with worries about this during the day, tried to ignore it, and then found you were disturbed by unresolved anxieties at night, your score would double to 8.

If you later divorced, despite the earlier reconciliation, you would have a further 8 stress points from the life even scale, doubling to 16 if the impact it has on you was severe. This would now put you on a total score in the last year of 24 – a significantly high level bearing in mind that anything over 20 signifies an exaggerate degree of stress.