Stress Buster

I'm lucky enough not to have much stress in my life. That's mostly because my vocation in life has involved sitting in bed playing mobile games, which only really causes anxiety when my phone starts running low on battery at a time when I need the plug sockets by my bed to charge up my electric toothbrush and have the lamp on. Even then, I suppose you could call it more mild annoyance than stress.

Those who have chosen a more challenging career path, though, or who have other issues such as an insane family or partner they hate the sight of, might well be suffering from stress. 21st century life, after all, can be very stressful. So much so that Sam Sparro even thought to sing a song about it.

Enter Stress Buster for mobile phones (which is quite an ironic format for it to appear on since one of the quickest ways to alleviate stress has to be to turn off your mobile phone), an application that calculates how much stress you're under in various areas of your life, then offers handy hints on how to reduce it.

What the game asks you to do is answer a series of questions, or choose from a set of statements, using a scale of 1-5. These questions fall into five categories - Diet, Health, State of Mind, Work and Personal Life.

So, in the State of Mind category for instance, you're asked questions such as 'are you happy with your life?' and 'do you think you influence other people's lives?' You then select on the 1-5 scale if your answer is strongly affirmative, mildly so, neutral, mildly disagreeable or strongly so. Your answer is reflected on the face of some woman called Veronica, who smiles when you select a positive answer and pulls a big miserable face when you don't.

The questions probe all sorts of matters as it seems pretty much everything can contribute to stress, such as debt, tiredness and the quality of your sex life. (Fortunately you can password protect your profile as it's likely you don't want your partner discovering that you don't trust them when they're only there to check the text messages on your phone).

With the questions answered, it's time to receive your percentage score of how stressed you are. The application then pinpoints your most negative answers and gives specific advice for dealing with those matters, as well as praising your good habits (like eating breakfast and not commuting to work - go me).

That's really about it - and, in truth, there's not much more content here than you'd find in your average newspaper supplement or women's magazine feature. The advice found in the game is quite concise but also fairly obvious.

Probably the only advantage to having the application on your phone is that your score is worked out and broken down for you. And also that you can - as recommended by the game - take the test every week or so, putting its advice into action and - hopefully - seeing the improvements for yourself. Indeed, the application congratulates (or berates) you based on your new score every time you redo it.

As far as this type of phone application goes, Stress Buster clearly has a worthy point to existing and may well be helpful to some people, but it doesn't go any further than simply offering a fairly bland quiz and some generic advice. More dynamic ways to reduce stress or perhaps a few stress-soothing mini-games would have been a nice addition. Instead it's all a bit bland and clinical, but not completely without merit if you think you could do with it.