Stress Trivia
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120 free Stress trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This stress trivia quiz covers everything from what happens in your adrenal glands when a deadline lands to the people who worked it out. Expect questions on cortisol and adrenaline, the fight-or-flight response, the general adaptation syndrome, the Holmes and Rahe life-events scale, the Yerkes-Dodson curve, burnout, PTSD and the strange condition known as broken heart syndrome. There is history too: the endocrinologist who borrowed the word 'stress' from engineering, the Harvard physiologist who coined 'fight or flight', the doctor who drank bacteria to prove ulcers were not caused by stress, and the reasons the British Army banned the phrase 'shell shock'. Plus the lighter side: stress balls, treadmill stress tests, bank stress tests and Stress Awareness Month. Questions run from easy to expert and every answer has been checked against a reliable source, so the quiz works for a psychology class, a workplace wellbeing session or a quiz night. Nothing here is medical advice; it is just good trivia.
30 of 120 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01When Hans Selye's injected lab animals all fell ill in the same way, what did he first believe he had discovered?
A new hormone
A new hormone. Then every irritant he tried, from cold to plain injury, left the animals with the same damage, stomach ulcers included, and he saw that the cause was the ordeal itself: stress.
Q 02Stanford's Robert Sapolsky spent decades studying stress in which wild animals in Kenya?
Baboons
Baboons. He called them the perfect subjects: they live in big, complex troops and have hours of daylight to spare, which, he wrote, they devote to being rotten to each other.
Q 03A polygraph looks for lies in breathing, heart rate, blood pressure and which other sign of stress?
Sweating
Sweating, read as a change in the skin's electrical conductance. Fear or plain nerves can raise all four signals in a truthful person, so a US National Academies review found little basis for expecting the polygraph to be highly accurate.
Q 04In the general adaptation syndrome, what final stage follows the alarm and resistance phases?
Exhaustion
Exhaustion. If the stressor never lets up, the body's reserves for resisting it finally run out, and it falls victim to the very thing it has been holding off.
Q 05Which term did Hans Selye popularise for positive, beneficial stress?
Eustress
Eustress joins the Greek eu-, good, to stress, by contrast with distress. Selye argued the body answers a happy demand and a harmful one in the same way; later studies have found differences.
Q 06Which 1956 bestseller by Hans Selye brought his general adaptation syndrome ideas to the public?
The Stress of Life
The Stress of Life took an idea worked out in the laboratory to general readers, and within a decade or so psychologists had adopted the word. He followed it in 1974 with Stress Without Distress.
Q 07Which Harvard physiologist coined 'fight or flight' and wrote The Wisdom of the Body (1932)?
Walter Cannon
Walter Cannon also took on William James's famous claim that we feel sorry because we cry: his experiments suggested that the feeling and the bodily upheaval arrive together, the Cannon-Bard theory.
Q 08Which newly discovered technology let the discoverer of fight-or-flight watch fear stop a cat's stomach from churning?
X-rays
X-rays. On the screen a nursing cat's stomach fell still the moment she grew anxious, and the waves began again only once she had been petted until she purred.
Q 09During the fight-or-flight response, which organ pours stored glucose into the blood for a burst of energy?
The liver
The liver keeps a reserve of glucose packed away as glycogen, and the hormone surge of an emergency unlocks it within moments, which is one reason a bad fright sends blood sugar climbing.
Q 10What happens to the pupils during the fight-or-flight response?
They dilate
They dilate, letting in more light so that sight sharpens along with the other senses. A frightened cat shows the same surge: wide pupils, a racing heart and fur standing on end.
Q 11Popular extensions of "fight or flight" add which two further F responses?
Freeze and fawn
Freeze and fawn: the therapist Pete Walker named the fawn response after treating adults abused as children, who had learned that pleasing a threatening parent was safer than protesting.
Q 12Which branch of the autonomic nervous system drives the fight-or-flight response?
Sympathetic
Sympathetic: its nerves also tug the tiny muscle at the base of each hair, which is why a sudden fright raises goosebumps.
Q 13The parasympathetic nervous system is often summarised by which four-word phrase?
Rest and digest
The cheekier version is "feed and breed". It slows the heart and gets digestion moving again once the threat has passed.
Q 21Which duo released the hit single "Stressed Out" in 2015?
Twenty One Pilots
Twenty One Pilots: when the song won them a Grammy in 2017, Tyler Joseph and Josh Dun dropped their trousers and collected it in their underwear, keeping a promise they had made to each other years earlier.
Q 22Cortisone was first identified by Edward Kendall and Harold Mason at which US institution?
The Mayo Clinic
The Mayo Clinic: its arthritis specialist Philip Hench had seen patients' pain ease during jaundice or pregnancy, suspected a steroid, and in 1948 tried Kendall's compound on rheumatoid arthritis with striking results.
Q 23On the 1967 Holmes and Rahe stress scale, which life event scores the maximum 100 points?
Q 14Which childhood pastime became a stress-relief craze for adults in 2015?
Colouring books
Colouring books: in 2011 a publisher asked the illustrator Johanna Basford for a children's one, she talked them into a book for grown-ups instead, and her Secret Garden went on to sell millions.
Q 15Cortisol raises blood sugar and, when it stays high, has what effect on the immune system?
Suppresses it
Suppresses it: cortisol blocks the release of the substances that cause inflammation, which is why the steroid medicines that calm asthma, eczema and arthritis are built to mimic it.
Q 16In a healthy person, cortisol levels are naturally highest at what time?
Early morning
Early morning: cortisol peaks around the time of waking and is much lower by late afternoon, which is why doctors schedule cortisol blood tests for the morning.
Q 17Which pituitary hormone signals the adrenal glands to make cortisol?
ACTH
ACTH, short for adrenocorticotropic hormone: doctors inject a man-made version and measure the cortisol that follows, to check that the adrenal glands still answer the signal.
Q 18Chronically excessive cortisol produces which named condition?
Cushing's syndrome
Cushing's syndrome is most often caused not by stress but by long courses of cortisol-like steroid medicines, taken for conditions such as asthma and rheumatoid arthritis.
Q 19Blood pressure that reads high only at the doctor's office, from sheer nerves, is named after what?
The white coat
The white coat: "white coat hypertension" is blamed on the anxiety of the visit, so doctors confirm it with a monitor that takes readings at home, where the numbers come out normal.
Q 20Where in the body are the adrenal glands located?
Above the kidneys
Above the kidneys, which is how they got their name: adrenal joins the Latin ad, "near", and renes, "kidneys". The right gland is pyramid-shaped and the left a crescent.
Death of a spouse
Death of a spouse scores 100, against 73 for divorce. Add up more than 300 points in a single year and the scale rates you at serious risk of illness.
Q 24On the Holmes and Rahe stress scale, which happy event outscores being fired?
Marriage
Marriage scores 50 life-change units to 47 for being fired, because the scale rates how much readjustment an event demands, welcome or not.
Q 25Thomas Holmes and Richard Rahe built their 1967 stress scale from records of 5,000 what?
Medical patients
Medical patients: the pair wanted to know whether a pile-up of life events came before illness. Rahe then gave the scale to 2,500 American sailors, whose scores did track who fell ill over the next six months.
Q 26The Yerkes-Dodson law, published in 1908, describes the relationship between performance and what?
Arousal
Arousal: performance climbs with pressure only up to a point and then falls away, an inverted U first seen in "dancing mice" learning which of two boxes gave an electric shock.
Q 27Herbert Freudenberger's 1974 paper "Staff Burn-Out" was about which worn-out group?
Free-clinic volunteers
Free-clinic volunteers, himself among them: after 12-hour days in his own practice the psychologist worked until 2 a.m. at a New York clinic for drug addicts, and wore out along with the rest of its staff.
Q 28How does the WHO's ICD-11 classify burnout?
An occupational phenomenon
An occupational phenomenon: the WHO defines burnout as the result of chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed, and says the word should not be used for other areas of life.
Q 29Besides reduced accomplishment and feeling emotionally drained, what is the Maslach Burnout Inventory's third dimension?
Depersonalization
Depersonalization: an unfeeling, impersonal response to the people a worker is meant to help. The version of the test for other jobs calls it cynicism, a way of keeping a draining job at a distance.
Q 30The Japanese word karoshi translates as what?
Overwork death
Overwork death: Japan officially rules deaths as karoshi, and after a 24-year-old at the ad agency Dentsu died in 2015, having logged over 100 hours of overtime a month, the company's president resigned.