Stress Score Checker

A wearable stress score estimates how hard your body is working, mostly from heart rate and heart rate variability, compared with your own baseline. On Garmin, 0–25 is a resting state and 76–100 is high stress. A WHOOP Recovery of 33% or below is red, and an Oura Readiness of 85 or more is optimal. None of them can tell how you feel, or why.

Each maker uses its own method, its own scale and your own history, so a number from one device cannot be compared with another. That is why the checker above asks which device and which score first, and then shows the maker’s own ranges with a link to the page they come from. The full tables for every device are printed under the tool.

1. Pick your device: Garmin, Oura, WHOOP, Fitbit or Pixel Watch, Samsung Galaxy Watch or Apple Watch. 2. Pick the score you are looking at, such as Garmin’s stress level or Body Battery. 3. Enter today’s number, or tap what your app shows for scores that come as zones. 4. Read what the maker says it means, and what it cannot tell you. 5. Answer three quick questions: your mood, how tense you feel and how much energy you have. 6. See the combined read: whether your body and your feelings agree, and what a gap can mean.

Save it with one tap and the next visit opens with your last check and a chart of body against feelings over time.

Garmin works out your stress level from heart rate variability while you are inactive. Its manuals put 0 to 25 as a resting state, 26 to 50 as low stress, 51 to 75 as medium and 76 to 100 as high. Garmin says training, activity, sleep, nutrition and general life stress all affect it, and that the readings work best if you wear the watch to sleep.

Body Battery is Garmin’s estimate of energy in reserve, built from HRV, stress, sleep quality and activity. In the Venu 3 and vívoactive 5 manuals it runs from 5 to 100: 76 to 100 is high reserve energy and 5 to 25 is very low. Sleep charges it, while hard activity and high stress drain it faster. Garmin also says food and caffeine have no direct effect on it. Our guide to the Garmin stress score and Body Battery goes into how to use both.

Oura’s Readiness Score runs from 0 to 100. Oura’s support page puts 85 to 100 as optimal, 70 to 84 as good, 60 to 69 as fair and 59 or below as “pay attention”. It combines last night’s resting heart rate, body temperature, sleep and activity with your longer-term HRV, sleep and activity balance against a two-month baseline.

Daytime Stress has no number. It shows four zones while you are awake and fairly still: restored, relaxed, engaged and stressed, measured against your own baseline, which Oura recalibrates daily. Oura is clear that this is based on your body’s signals rather than your emotions, and that you can feel fine while your body reads stressed. More in our guide to the Oura Readiness Score.

WHOOP Recovery is calculated each night and given as a percentage: 67% or above is green (high recovery), 34 to 66% is yellow and 33% or below is red. HRV against your 30-day baseline and resting heart rate are the two biggest factors, with breathing rate, sleep, skin temperature and blood oxygen also counted. WHOOP’s Stress Monitor gives a live score from 0, low stress, to 3, your peak stress level, by comparing heart rate and HRV with your last 14 days. WHOOP names only the two ends, so the checker splits the scale into thirds and says so. See our WHOOP Recovery score guide for more.

In the Fitbit app, the Stress Management Score ran from 0 to 100, with a higher score meaning fewer physical signs of stress. The Google Health app now shows a daily Resilience rating instead: optimal, balanced or low, built from heart rate, HRV and skin responses, the balance of recent exercise, and your sleep.

Samsung Health estimates stress on Galaxy Watch from heart rate variability and changes in heart rate. Its help pages publish no number bands, so the checker asks whether your reading sits low, in the middle or high. Samsung is unusually direct about the limits: your personal emotions are not calculated when measuring your stress level.

Not with a stress score. Apple Watch records heart rate variability as SDNN in the Health app, and you can log how you feel with State of Mind in the Mindfulness app. On Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4, the Readiness app gives a daily score from 0 to 10, from Recover (0 to 1) and Pace Yourself (2 to 4) to Ready (5 to 7) and Go for it (8 to 10), based on sleep, vitals including HRV, and activity. Apple calls it a general wellness feature. For HRV itself, the HRV by age checker works with Apple Watch numbers, and does Apple Watch track stress? covers the rest.

The most useful part of the checker is the gap. A device reads arousal, the body’s readiness for action. Plenty of things raise it without feeling like stress: a workout, a cold coming on, alcohol, coffee, a short night or good excitement. WHOOP itself notes that illness, dehydration, poor sleep or altitude can push the score up while you feel fine. If your body says strain and you feel fine for several days running, look at sleep, training and whether you are getting ill.

The opposite gap is just as common. Worry can sit in your thoughts before it shows in your heart rate, and most devices only read you while you are still. How you feel counts, whatever the watch says. Naming what is behind it often helps, and so does a few minutes of calming the body directly, such as a vagus nerve reset. If you want to understand your body’s stress reaction itself, read about the fight or flight response.

Wearable scores are wellness estimates, not medical readings. They cannot tell what is causing the strain, whether it is dread or excitement, or how your life is going. For a picture of the last few weeks rather than the last few hours, the stress level test asks about your mind, body and habits, and the burnout test looks at work. To see how short nights feed into all of these numbers, check the sleep calculator.