Health “I’m stressed” is a phrase that many of us use, but now there are ways to shed light on how stressed you actually are Facebook / Meta Twitter / X icon Linkedin Reddit Email Mojo Wang Working out what makes you stressed and how much is too much can feel quite subjective. Increasingly, however, technology can help. Most smartwatches can give you a basic reading of stress using your heart rate. A healthy resting heart rate for an adult is between 60 and 100 beats per minute. Cortisol and adrenaline, released when your stress response kicks in, can raise this; a poor ability to recover from stress can keep it raised. Many smartwatches also track heart rate variability (HRV), a measure of the natural variations in time between consecutive heartbeats. When your body is stressed, cortisol and adrenaline trigger a fast and consistent heart rate, reducing this natural variability between beats. When the parasympathetic system kicks in to restore balance, your natural variation increases.…