Seem like everyone is stressed out these days? Now there’s some proof to back it up.
Americans are more stressed today than three decades ago, the first-ever historical analysis of stress over time has found.
Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University analyzed data from 1983, 2006 and 2009, and found people's self-reported stress levels have increased 10-30% in the last three decades.
Who had it the worst? Women, young people and low-income Americans were the most stressed, according to data published in this month's issue of the Journal of Applied Psychology.
Men may be catching up, however. Men’s stress levels increased more over time than women’s, rising 25% since 1983 versus 18%.
"It's clear that stress is still very much present in Americans' lives, putting them at greater risk of many diseases," said Sheldon Cohen, study co-author and professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon.
High stress has been linked to a range of health conditions including high blood pressure, heart disease, obesity and diabetes, according to the Mayo Clinic.
Evaluating stress levels in different demographics may help identify populations at greater risk for physical and psychological health problems, Cohen told CBS.
Researchers found people with less education, low income levels and the unemployed experienced high levels of stress.
The good news is, stress went down as people got older.
"Thirty-year-olds have less stress than 20-year-olds, and 40-year-olds have less stress than 30-year-olds," Cohen told USA Today.
The 2008 financial downturn had little impact on stress except in white, middle-aged men with college educations, whose stress levels spiked considerably after 2008, increasing more than twice as fast as any other category.
"They had the most to lose in terms of the effects on the market," Cohen told the Pittsbourgh Post-Gazette. "When we thought about it, it made a lot of sense."
Dr. David Spiegel, a psychiatrist at Stanford University School of Medicine told USA Today it makes perfect sense stress levels would be higher today than 25 years ago.
"Economic pressures are greater, and it's harder to turn off information, and it's harder to buffer ourselves from the world," he said.
The data was collected from phone or online surveys of 6,300 people.