Life

This Free Quiz Can Help You Figure Out Exactly How You Get Stressed — And How To Manage It

by Carolyn de Lorenzo
DragonImages/Shutterstock

Learning effective stress management is integral to staying healthy, mentally well, and happy. Everyone is different when it comes to how stress impacts them, and not all stress is a bad thing. But chronic stress is different. When your stress response is on high alert on a regular basis, it can harm your physical and mental health over time. But one of the big issues with chronic stress? It can become imperceptible over time, fading into the background — but the symptoms it causes will still feel very real. So how do you take control of that stress? A new free, online quiz is here to help. Tia's female signature stress quiz can help you identify how stress affects you, and what steps you can take to protect your health.

Understanding your unique stress response can help you care for yourself more effectively. To that end, Tia's Chief Medical Officer Dr. Stephanie McClellan, alongside a team of experts, is launching the new online quiz across the United States. This free stress tool can help you figure out your chronic stress type or stress signature. The quiz asks about everything to energy levels when you wake up in the morning, to your eating habits, to your workout routine, to if you have allergies. Once you complete the quiz and determine your stress signature, the platform then provides both clinical and self-care focused recommendations for better stress management, developed with experts and informed by research, which is all available for review on the quiz's glossary page. While taking an online quiz isn't the same thing as talking to your regular doctor about your symptoms, it can be helpful to understand more about how you react to stress.

Tia’s quiz identifies four main stress signature types: Vigilant Sprinters are highly motivated early birds who tend to need more calming practices to stay balanced, while Reluctant Sprinters tend to cycle through pushing too hard and then crashing out. Reluctant Pacers are an especially sensitive stress type, and usually need a strong daily structure in place when it comes to meal times, sleep, workouts, and mindfulness practices. Identifying your stress type can help you understand how your body and mind react to stress, what to look out for in terms of symptoms, and how to structure your day so that you can minimize the negative impacts of stress as much as possible.

If, like me, you’re a Vigilant Pacer, then you tend to stay calm most of the time — but you really feel the effects of stress when you get maxed out. In order to avoid major fatigue and energy crashes, Vigilant Pacers need a daily structure in place that helps support both circadian rhythms and cortisol balance, in order to minimize the wear and tear effects of chronic stress.

You can't control every variable in life, but how you respond to stress is within your control. If you don’t handle stress that well, know that stress management is a skill set that you can improve on over time. You can’t avoid every stressful curveball, but you can adopt habits that can help keep you healthy in the long run.