Daily stress and worry plummet after age 50
After 50, daily stress and worry take a dive and daily happiness increases, according to an analysis of more than 340,000 adults questioned about the emotions they experienced “yesterday.”
The research, published online today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that young adults experience more negative emotions more frequently than those who are older. Negative emotions, such as stress and anger, are similar in that they consistently decline with age, but worry holds steady until around 50, when it sharply drops, the study shows.
The analysis is based on a Gallup phone survey of 340,847 adults, ages 18-85, which was compiled in 2008 as the first year of a 25-year effort to measure well-being in the USA.
The Gallup Organization, along with the Tennessee-based Healthways Corp., created the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, in which about 1,000 adults each day were surveyed from Jan. 2 to Dec. 31 to get a real-time view of well-being. Respondents were asked about various emotions, such as enjoyment, happiness, stress, worry, anger and sadness, and asked to describe how they felt “yesterday.”
“After 50 is when things start dropping off dramatically in terms of worry and stress. That’s the turning point in some ways, but it’s not a magic number in terms of everything that’s better,” says study co-author Arthur Stone, a professor of psychiatry and psychology at Stony Brook University in Stony Brook, N.Y. He is also a senior scientist with Gallup.