Personal Stress Navigator – Your Personal GPS To Wellness

Measuring Stress with The Personal Stress Navigator

The Personal Stress Navigator (PSN) is the “Gold Standard” of stress assessment. It provides a scientific and comprehensive assessment of the stresses caused by the demands and pressures of everyday life. Simply taking the PSN has been shown to reduce stress by 13 percent and symptoms by 15 percent.

The 246-item PSN consists of three sections that measure… biobehavioral model of stress, stress management, stress reduction:

  • Susceptibility to Stress: a single scale consisting of 22 items sampling health behaviors, lifestyle issues, and coping resources (social, financial and spiritual).
  • Sources of Stress: six scales measuring job stress (47 items), family stress (25 items), personal stress (21 items), social stress (23 items), environmental stress (22 items), and financial stress (16 items)
  • Symptoms of Stress: seven scales sampling the most commonly occurring stress symptoms within a given physiological subsystem, including: muscular (10 items), parasympathetic nervous system (10 items), sympathetic nervous system (10 items), emotional system (10 items), cognitive system (10 items), endocrine system (10 items), and immune system (10 items).

The PSN is based on a scientifically sound Biobehavioral Model of Stress developed in the 1980’s by the Behavioral Health Science team of Drs Lyle Miller & Adell Smith. Their model views stress from three separate, but related, angles: susceptibility, life’s demands and pressures, and physical and mental symptoms of stress. The model describes stress as an additive and cumulative process that is largely subjective in nature. The PSN translates the model into psychometrically sound scales that provide prescriptive, diagnostic stress formulations for the user.

By combining individual data, organizational stress profiles can be constructed for companies and organizations. The organizational profiles target solutions to the causes of stress affecting the organization as a whole.