To accurately predict structural performance under impending extreme winds, it is imperative to identify the existing stressing condition in critical structural components before a hazard (intrinsic stress, referred to as "existing stress" hereafter). The identified existing stress should be added onto the stress induced by future extreme winds in order to determine the real structural performance under these conditions. To identify the existing stress, a novel approach is proposed in this study based on the connection between the unknown existing stress-existing strain curve and the measured stress—strain curve. This approach takes advantage of the known strain information when the material yields. Therefore, an approach to determine when the material yields is also developed. The proposed identification approach does not require any information on previous loads or load effects. Two numerical simulations and one laboratory test are conducted to validate the proposed identification approach. The obtained results demonstrated that the proposed approach is able to identify the existing stress with high accuracy and can be potentially implemented in practical applications.