Life tracking assessment
This is a way to help you to understand your current pressures and any impacts. See what’s going well, what’s difficult and pinpoint where you could make a positive difference.

Stress is a built-in response designed to help us rise to challenges, learn, and adapt.
When we meet a high-demand moments, our body mobilises, focus gets sharper, energy increases, and we become more alert. This response is healthy and helpful when it’s understood and able to be used well.

But our relationship to stress - how we think about it, and how much recovery we build-in, can influence whether it strengthens us or we turn away from it. It’s helpful when we think about different categories of stress. Dr Alia Crum, Associate Professor of Psychology at Stanford University, references these main types:

Moments of high demand
This type of stress is temporary and often arises in response to a challenge or a moment when we’re asked to step up. It can be leveraged to help us to achieve our best and is most energising when paired with a mindset that views stress as enhancing.

Ongoing high demand
Times like this will feel uncomfortable, but with the right mindset they can also be stimulating and purposeful. Much depends on how you interpret what’s happening and the meaning you assign to the challenges you face. It’s also important to ensure you’re getting enough down-time to recover. And spend that time in the best ways for you to feel recovery.

Chronic high demand
When high-demand periods start blending into one another without enough recovery, support, or belief that what is happening is a time of growth or expansion for you, then it not only mentally exhausting but can also start to lead health issues. Problem-solving might become reactive rather than creative, we may experience ongoing fatigue, and it can become harder to see the bigger picture.

I put this assessment together to give you a way to landmark the impacts of pressure and opportunity in your life right now, to be able to benchmark how things have changed over time, and to clarify where you would like to make improvements going forward.

These questions are designed to elicit your subjective responses, how you feel about your experience. They will give you a snapshot of how you see and feel things today. The benefit is that this captures your lived experience in the moment and provides a marker you can revisit over time. The limitation is that it is not scientific or diagnostic, and your responses may shift depending on mood, memory, or circumstances.

A useful way to use this tool is to fill it in and consider how it might help you move forward in a proactive and sensitive way. You can return to it periodically, once every quarter is a good checkpoint, and see how your results are trending.

Alternatively, you might want to use it as a starting point in a session with me. We can take 30 minutes to look at your answers together, make sense of what you are experiencing, and work out next steps.

If it feels helpful, you could also use it as a tool to discuss with your GP, counsellor, or other support people.