Modern medical practice depends heavily on profiles, but so far, we have no standard stress profile. This chapter presents a few of the options for creating a stress profile that can guide your decisions about risks and treatment planning. It then distills the complexities of stress measurement to three types of assessments: subjective distress, lifetime exposures and responses, and physiologic measures of toxic stress responses.

This chapter introduces our stress response system and how it works in the sprints of life. Under the best of circumstances and when we are in the pink of health, our stress response system functions like a finely conducted orchestra, and we hardly notice what a marvel of orchestration we live by. Herbert Benson’s studies in the 1970’s of the physiology of transcendental meditation paved the way for the Mind Body Institute and others to practice approaches retraining dysregulated stress responses. A discussion of the distinguishing features of our stress response system leads the concept of allostasis or the cumulative burden of stressors across a lifetime—a measure of the wear and tear of life.