STRESS AND LIVING LIFE IN CRESCENDO

All of the traumatic events listed in the charts below will lead to stress. But I contend that if your life is led with purpose, you spend less time dwelling on the negative and focusing on the tasks at hand, gleaning the most positive things you can from any trauma. Life happens, but its how you play the hand you’re dealt that matters. Just ask people like Stephen Hawking, who has been a prisoner of his body due to ALS for most of his life.

In 1967, psychiatrists Thomas Holmes and Richard Rahe surveyed over 5,000 medical patients as a way to determine whether stressful events might cause illnesses. Patients were asked to tally a list of 43 life events based on a relative score. A positive correlation of 0.118 was found between their life events and their illnesses.

Their results became known as the Holmes and Rahe Stress Scale. Rahe carried out a study in 1970 testing the reliability of the stress scale as a predictor of illness. The scale was given to 2,500 US sailors and they were asked to rate scores of ‘life events’ over the previous six months. Over the next six months, detailed records were kept of the sailors’ health. There was a +0.118 correlation between stress scale scores and illness, which was sufficient to support the hypothesis of a link between life events and illness.

To measure stress according to the Holmes and Rahe Stress Scale, the number of “Life Change Units” that apply to events in the past year of an individual’s life are added and the final score will give a rough estimate of how stress affects health. The test below relates to adults:
Score of 300+: At risk of illness.

Score of 150-299+: Risk of illness is moderate (reduced by 30% from the above risk).

Score 150-: Only have a slight risk of illness.

A modified scale has also been developed for non-adults. Similar to the adult scale, stress points for life events in the past year are added and compared to the rough estimate of how stress affects health.

Score of 300+: At risk of illness.

Score of 150-299+: Risk of illness is moderate. (reduced by || 30% from the above risk)

Score 150-: Slight risk of illness.

Again, I don’t have a mathematical formula to the decrease in risk of illness when one lives life in crescendo, but given that Stephen Hawking has lived for seventy years, and most of my other crescendo heroes just keep on trucking because they don’t know enough to slow down.

Stay tuned for my series on Crescendo Heroes—individuals that don’t have the time to worry about affliction or dwell on bad karma because they’re creating too much good in their own respective worlds.