Devices and methods are provided for performing a high-frequency jitter self stress check on a receiver to assist with optimization. High-frequency jitter is injected into a clock signal recovered from a received data signal and used to sample the data signal. The injected jitter increases the bit error rate (BER), making BER a more useful and quicker optimization metric in applications using low-noise communication links. Error correction is used to maintain acceptable output BER while the self stress check is in progress.