Welcome back to Age Wise, exploring the science of improving physical health and mental wellness at every stage of life. This week, some good news, and some bad news, about stress.
First, the good news, and something most adults can look forward to: It’s long been established that older people are happier, on average, than young adults or people in middle age. One reason, a new study confirms, is that “the number of daily stressors and people's reactivity to daily stressors decreases with age,” scientists will report next year in the journal Developmental Psychology.
“There’s something about growing old that leads to fewer stressors,” said study leader David Almeida, PhD, a professor and psychologist at Penn State who studies stress and coping. “This could be the types of social roles that we fill as we age. As younger people, we may be juggling more, including jobs, families and homes, all of which create instances of daily stress. But as we age, our social roles and motivations change. Older people talk about wanting to maximize and enjoy the time they have.”
The finding draws from interviews of more than 3,000 U.S. adults on multiple occasions over a 20-year period. An example of the findings: “25-year-olds reported stressors on nearly 50% of days, while 70-year-olds reported stressors on only 30% of days… A 25-year-old is much grumpier on the days when they experience a stressor, but as we age, we really figure out how to decrease those exposures,” Almeida said in a statement.
However, the data indicate that stress declines into the mid-50s and then—again on average—tends to level out or even increase, due at least in part to the emergence of new wellness challenges related to aging.
Interestingly, Almeida’s previous work has revealed the predictive importance of being able to handle small stressors in early adulthood, things like being late to a meeting, arguing with a partner or caring for a sick child. “Our emotional responses to these events are predictive of later health and well-being, including chronic conditions, mental health and even mortality,” he said.
And as you might imagine, not everyone is so good at managing stress. So here comes the bad news:
The number of stressors piled on in 2022, a series of permacrises adding to two years of heavy stress from the pandemic and economic challenges, causing millions of people to become permastressed. I made the case for permastress this week in a year-end look-back story on Medium:
A whopping 27% of U.S. adults say they’re so stressed most days that they can’t function normally, according to a survey released in October by the American Psychological Association. Younger adults are particularly permastressed.
The survey somewhat confirms Almeida’s general findings, but suggests an ongoing decline in stress well into old age (at least in the present-moment snapshot):
But 2022 may or may not be reflective of historical norms. As I note:
Rooted in political polarization, sowed by disinformation and online hate speech, and fertilized by a neverending pandemic of plagueish proportion, 2022 grew into a year in which stress and anxiety exceeded our ability to cope. Everyday concerns blossomed like a blood stain into chronic worry, anxiety, and stress that just won’t go away. Yes, we’re permastressed. And not by just one gut-wrenching crisis but by multiple ongoing permacrises.
That’s not good. Chronic stress—permastress—raises your risk of heart attack, stroke, depression, dementia and a host of other physical and mental conditions.
So I leave you with this:
If you feel stress or anxiety on a regular basis, read my article about permastress, which explains why you might be feeling this way, and which includes concrete suggestions for how to confront stressors and lower your stress level. Your health, after all, depends on it.
Totally Unrelated: This is What Happens When You Flush the Toilet
When you flush a toilet with the lid up, water droplets too small to see—and potentially packed with infectious viruses or bacteria lingering in the bowl from a previous pooper—woosh into a plume that stays airborne for minutes and spreads across the bathroom, a new experiment reveals. You’ve got to see the videos in this news story I posted this morning on Medium.
Your support makes this free newsletter possible. If you find it useful, please consider forwarding it. You can find more of my health and wellness writing on Medium. Also find me on YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Linkedin. And if you ever feel tired, unfocused, stressed or cranky in the afternoon, check out my book, Make Sleep Your Superpower.—Rob