by Dr. Jerry Kennard

Created on: April 16, 2010

Life is stressful, but do you know just how stressful those irritating little hassles really are? Well the answer is very. The accumulated effect of losing your keys and running late for work can actually damage your health, possibly more so than significant life events.

We’ve known about the health effects of stress for quite some time. The psychologists Holmes and Rahe focused on significant life events that require people to make mental adjustments and proposed a way to measure them. The Social Readjustment Rating Scale became an instant hit when it was first published in 1967 and the simplicity of the approach gave it an intuitive appeal. Death of a spouse, for example, received a point score of 100 while the effect of a vacation such as Christmas scored 12. The more points an individual could accrue the greater the assumed stress they were under.

There have been several revisions to the original scale and, overall, this and similar scales remain popular. But they are not without problems. Many of the higher scores, for example, involve events and situations that most average people rarely encounter. For example, the top three stressful situations on the original Holmes and Rahe scale include death of a spouse (100 points), divorce (73 points) and marital separation (65 points). It also seems to assume that everyone will experience stress to these issues in much the same way, but we know this isn’t the case.

Everyone knows the emotional effects of a difficult day. Maybe you’ve had to get the kids to school, got caught in traffic, found your colleague is off sick, deadlines have been moved forward and so on. These irritating hassles are the things most of us associate with on a daily basis. It was Allen Kanner and his colleagues who first devised a way to examine the activities and situations to which most people are exposed regularly. From this, Kanner produced the Hassles Scale, which reflected daily annoyances and frustrations. Similarly he produced the Uplifts scale, reflecting things that make people feel better. If our hassles consistently outweigh our uplifts and our resources to cope, then this is stress.

So what can we learn about hassles? Well, for one thing they seem to vary over time. In a 1981 survey, for example, the top six most frequent hassles to emerge were:

Concerns about weight.
Health of a family member.
Rising price of common goods.
Home maintenance.
Too many things to do.
Misplacing or losing things.

In 1990 a New Zealand survey revealed the following top ten daily hassles:

Not enough time.
Too many things to do.
Troubling thoughts about the future.
Too many interruptions.
Misplacing or losing things.
Health of a family member.
Social obligations.
Concerns about standards.
Concerns about getting ahead.
Too many responsibilities.

Is the Hassles Scale better than the Social Readjustment Rating Scale? Well, yes and no. The Hassles Scale comes closer to the everyday stressors we experience. The drip-drip effect of stress is well accepted and seems, to some extent, to be reflected in such a scale. Even so, some people argue that the items on the scale seem rather vague and arbitrary and perhaps more likely to assess neuroticism than stress.

These scales, or derivatives of them, are still used today even though recent trends point more towards the use of structured interviews to elicit more accurate and detailed data. Scales may help to form an initial impression, but their interpretation requires more in the way of detailed information. We seem to accept that hassles exist but measuring them and determining their true effect on our health remains something of a nut to crack.

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