Catching traffic jams every morning, staying late at work by habit, getting home and not having time for your family are everyday experiences that make our stress and anxiety levels soar. They can also sink us into sadness. And, stuck in that routine maelstrom, we can end up suffering a serious increase in blood pressure, depression, diabetes and obesity. The good news is that they are easy problems to detect and have a solution. The first step is to do a simple test, such as the one available on the website of the Ministry of Health.
In the case of stress, it is a 14-question test prepared by the Spanish Society for the Study of Anxiety and Stress, which assesses how we react to certain stressful situations, as well as the frequency or intensity with which we experience a set of symptoms The result is obtained using the Perceived Stress Scale. If we have more than 23 points, we have had a high stress level in the last month. If the score is 34 or higher, the level is very high.
To know our anxiety levels, we must answer 12 questions about how often we have had certain cognitive, physiological and motor symptoms. If the sum of our results is 16 or greater (in the case of men), or 19 or greater (in the case of women), the Ministry recommends looking for a professional to make a more thorough evaluation.
The sadness test consists of 15 questions and will give us several results related to different emotions: sadness, mood, anger, anxiety, fatigue and the General Index of Emotional Alteration (the sum of some of the above). The Ministry provides a table with the different scores by which these feelings are considered to be high or very high.