One tool for promoting mental health is human stress detection through multitasks of electroencephalography (EEG) recordings. This study proposed a short-term stress detection approach using VGGish as a feature extraction and convolution neural network (CNN) as a classifier based on EEG signals from the SAM 40 dataset. This database was recently available and was collected from 40 patients using 32 channels to identify performance on four tasks including Stroop color-word test (SCWT), answering arithmetic problems, finding mirror-identical images, and relaxing. Each task took 25 s to complete and was then repeated three times to record three trials. This means that the total EEG data contain 480 signals for four tasks recorded using 120 trials per task. The primary objective of this research was to track the amount of short-term stress that patients experienced while they engaged in the four mental tasks. Moreover, the VGGish-CNN model is applied to the SAM 40 dataset using five stages including signal preprocessing, segmentation, filtration, spectrogram, and classification process. We compared the VGGish-CNN model and the VGGish model for stress-based EEG classification to determine the best classification accuracy. The proposed approach for stress detection is the preliminary study that achieved an accuracy of 99.25% using the VGGish-CNN model on the SAM 40 dataset. Next, k-fold cross validation is performed to verify the efficiency of the VGGish-CNN model. This study can advance the application of brain–computer interface (BCI) and its use to identify patterns in EEG data that invoke stress-related inferences to aid in the diagnosis of mental disorders. In the future, investigation of human stress using EEG data will be useful in neurorehabilitation.