The Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU) has received €19.6 million Gravity Grant from the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (OCW) to develop new methods for measuring and reducing stress in daily life. The aim is to prevent stress-related diseases by better mapping the impact of stress on our daily lives and understanding person-specific patterns of stress responses. Together with researchers from UMC Groningen, the University of Groningen, Erasmus MC and the University of Twente, the VU will work on the ‘Stress-in-Action’ project over the next 10 years.

Stress, according to research leader and Amsterdam UMC professor Brenda Penninx (psychiatric epidemiology), is the biggest disease burden and a major threat to our well-being and even to a healthy economy. However, our understanding of stress is very limited and there remains a gap between our understanding of what determines stress in our daily lives and how to reduce it. With improved technologies, new monitoring and intervention strategies can be developed to track and reduce stress in daily life and its impact on health.