Care Calculator

The Care Calculator is a free reflection tool that helps you see the relationship between the stress you're carrying and the care you're receiving. Most stress assessments tell you how much strain you're under and stop there. The Care Calculator goes further: it maps your sources of care and shows you whether your support roughly matches your load. The result is a simple care map - what you may need, what you have, and the gap between them. It's meant to start a conversation with yourself, not to deliver a clinical verdict.

It takes three steps. First, you identify the major life events and stressors you’re facing right now or over the past year. Second, you map every source of care in your life partner, family, friends, faith community, therapist, support group, peer listeners, and more - and how often each one actually shows up. Third, you see your care balance: estimated care needed versus care you currently have. If there’s a gap, the tool offers practical, optional suggestions for where more support might come from.

The stress side is built on the Holmes-Rahe Life Stress Inventory, a widely used scale whose relative weights have decades of research behind them. We’ve added roughly fifteen modern stressors - things like burnout, online harassment, and job loss to automation - and assigned those our own estimated weights. These new items are all marked with an asterisk (*).

The care side is different: the care-unit values, the way needs compound when multiple events stack up, and the adjustment for how well you feel you’re coping are first-pass estimates set by our team, not figures derived from clinical trials. They are informed starting points, not measured quantities.

We publish these numbers openly on purpose. They are a hypothesis, not a finding. We’re actively inviting researchers to test, challenge, and revise them. Please treat the output as a mirror that helps you reflect, not a measurement instrument.

The Holmes-Rahe Life Stress Inventory, also called the Social Readjustment Rating Scale, was developed by psychiatrists Thomas Holmes and Richard Rahe in 1967. It assigns point values to 43 major life events, from the death of a spouse (100 points) to minor violations of the law (11 points), and research has long linked higher cumulative scores with greater risk of stress-related illness.

In the decades since, it has become one of the most widely used stress measures in psychology and has been validated across many countries and cultures, from Japan to Latin America to Europe. It isn’t beyond criticism - researchers have long pointed out that the exact point values, and the illness-risk percentages sometimes attached to them, rest on subjective ratings rather than firm prediction. The Care Calculator uses the scale only as a rough way to weight and order stressors. It does not predict your odds of getting sick, and you shouldn’t read any health forecast into your score.

A care deficit occurs when the amount of emotional support, connection, and care you’re receiving falls short of what your current stress load requires. Just as your body needs more nutrition during physical illness or recovery, your emotional system needs more care during periods of high stress. Many people experiencing a care deficit don’t realize it. They assume something is wrong with them or that they should be coping better or feeling stronger. The Care Calculator helps reframe this: you’re not broken, you may simply be under-supported.

A care unit represents one meaningful interaction where you feel genuinely heard, seen, and supported - a real conversation with a close friend, a therapy session, time in a support group, an exchange with a volunteer listener, a moment of true connection in a faith community. Care units are directional estimates, not precise measurements. Not all of them are equal in practice: a deep conversation with someone who has lived through what you’re facing may carry more weight than a quick check-in with a neighbor. The calculator uses rough values to sketch a picture, and we expect to refine them over time as researchers help us test them.

7 Cups built this tool. We offer free, 24/7 peer support, and we also provide paid services, including online therapy - so we’ll say plainly that we have an interest in your visiting us. That’s exactly why we’ve tried to design against it. The calculator counts every source of care equally - a partner, a sibling, a close friend, a faith community, a support group, and a professional therapist all register as real care, with no source ranked above another. When 7 Cups appears, it’s because free, 24/7 peer support is one accessible option, not because we weigh it more heavily. The tool works fully whether or not you ever click through to us, and you should disregard any suggestion that doesn’t fit your life.

People experiencing a care deficit often report feeling persistently overwhelmed even when individual problems seem manageable; feeling isolated even when surrounded by people; struggling to bounce back from setbacks that once felt survivable; emotional exhaustion that rest doesn’t fix; a nagging sense that something is wrong with them; and withdrawing from the very relationships that could help. One important caveat: these signs overlap heavily with depression, anxiety, burnout, and some medical conditions, and the calculator can’t tell the difference. If they’re persistent or severe, please talk to a professional.

The Care Calculator is a reflection tool, not a clinical assessment, diagnostic instrument, or medical prescription. The care units generated are directional estimates designed to help you visualize your support landscape. We are actively working with academic researchers to scientifically validate and refine the care weights behind the calculator. If you are in crisis, experiencing thoughts of self-harm, or need immediate support, please contact emergency services or a crisis helpline right away.

No. The Care Calculator is a reflection tool - not a clinical assessment, a diagnostic instrument, or a medical prescription. The care units it generates are directional estimates meant to help you visualize your support landscape, and we’re seeking to work with academic researchers to validate and refine the care weights behind it. If you are in crisis, having thoughts of harming yourself, or need immediate help, please contact emergency services or a crisis line right away. In the US, you can call or text 988 (the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline); elsewhere, contact your local emergency number or crisis service.

Yes. Your results are calculated in your browser and are never stored or shared unless you choose to share them. You don’t need an account, and we don’t ask for personal information to use the tool.

They’re two different measures, and we keep them separate on purpose. The stress points (drawn from Holmes-Rahe) describe your load - how heavy this season is. The care units describe flow - how much genuine, supportive contact is moving through your life in a typical week. We do not convert one directly into the other, because a long-validated stress scale and our own first-pass care estimates shouldn’t be understood as a single exchange rate. Your stress total sets the overall load picture and shapes which suggestions you see; the actual comparison of "care needed" versus "care you have" happens entirely in care units.

Underneath, each life event carries an estimated number of meaningful weekly contacts that tend to help someone carry it. That figure loosely follows the event’s stress weight. Grief and loss are weighted to need more steady presence than their stress score alone would suggest; a heavy but logistical event, like taking on a large mortgage, needs less even at a similar score. Events of equal "readjustment magnitude" don’t all ask for the same amount of human presence. Losing someone calls for near-daily contact in a way a financial strain of comparable weight does not.

We anchored the scale at both ends to something recognizable: the most devastating events land at roughly daily support, the mildest at about a weekly check-in - an echo of the old idea that we need frequent contact to get through a crisis and a lighter touch for ordinary strain. As with everything on the care side, these are informed starting points that we expect to refine as researchers help us test them.

First: this is common, and it is not a personal failing. Plenty of people - especially during isolating seasons like grief, a move, illness, or divorce - find that when they actually map their care, there’s far less there than they expected. The tool is designed to surface that honestly, not to grade you on it. A large gap doesn’t mean you’ve done something wrong; it means the support around you is thin right now, and that’s a circumstance, not a character flaw.

Second: the suggestions are built with this in mind. Some sources of care don’t require an existing network — a support group, a sharing circle, or a volunteer listener can be reached even if you’re starting from very little. If the tool suggests "ask someone in your life" and there isn’t an obvious someone, focus instead on the options that help you build new connection rather than draw on connection you don’t yet have.

It’s built for anyone who senses they’re carrying a lot and wants to understand why, name the gap between stress and support, and decide where to reach for more. It is not a substitute for professional diagnosis or treatment, and it is not built for acute crisis. If you’re in danger or thinking about harming yourself, don’t use a calculator - reach out to emergency services or a crisis line now (in the US, call or text 988).