Psychological stress declines rapidly from age 50 in the United States: Yet another well-being paradox

doi:10.1016/j.jpsychores.2017.09.016

Journal of Psychosomatic Research

Volume 103, December 2017, Pages 22-28

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpsychores.2017.09.016 Get rights and content

Highlights

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Daily stress shows a pronounced decrease from 50 to 85 years of age.
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The age-stress relationship was replicated across three large studies.
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Factors such as employment, health, or social support cannot explain the pattern.

Abstract

Objectives

Although there is evidence that evaluative subjective well-being (e.g., life satisfaction) shows a U-shaped pattern with highest satisfaction in the youngest and oldest years and lowest in the middle years of adulthood, much less is known about experiential well-being. We explore a negative indicator of experiential well-being (perceived stress), examine its association with age, and explore possible determinants of the age pattern.

Methods

Using Gallup-Healthways survey data of over 1.5 million U.S. respondents, we analyzed a question asking about stress yesterday and demographic determinants of the pattern. To confirm this pattern, data on stress was analyzed from the American Time Use Survey and data on distress was analyzed from the Health and Retirement Survey.

Results

We show that ratings of daily, perceived stressfulness yield a paradox, with high levels from the 20's through about age 50, followed by a precipitous decline through the 70's. Data from the other two surveys confirmed the age pattern for stress. Regressions with the Gallup-Healthways data statistically controlled several third-variables, yet none substantially altered the pattern.

Conclusion

We argue that this new experiential well-being pattern informs us about aging in the US and the “paradox” calls out for explanation.

Introduction

Over the last two decades considerable effort has gone into understanding how aging relates to well-being. To date we know that in English-speaking, developed, Western countries evaluative well-being (e.g., life satisfaction) generally follows a U-shaped association with age, where the lowest levels of well-being are in the early to mid-50s [1], [2]. In this paper, we examine the age association of another dimension of SWB, experiential well-being,¹ that refers to perceptions of everyday tensions, miseries, and joys [3]. Because experiential well-being can fluctuate in response to daily events, it is commonly assessed with brief recall periods, often for a single day.² Perceived stress is one of the negative aspects of experiential well-being. It is defined as a subjective experience based on a respondent's understanding of the word “stress” and is based on the pioneering work of Lazarus and others [5]. An extensive literature shows that perceived stress is linked to health outcomes, including endocrine [6], immune [7], [8], autonomic nervous system processes [9], and morbidity [10], [11], [12]. Thus, there are compelling reasons to evaluate the pattern of perceived stress over the life span and to explore what might cause it. Despite this, connections between psychological stress and aging have received surprising little attention in the research literature. A notable exception is a study examining 355,334 participants in the Gallup-Healthways Well-being Survey [1], a U.S. telephone interview survey that includes both evaluative and experiential measures of well-being. The observed age pattern for daily stress was remarkably strong: stress was relatively high from age 20 through 50, followed by a precipitous decline through age 70 and beyond. This is consistent with other daily studies that find a reduction in both frequency and severity of stressors as people advance past middle age [13], [14].

This paper has three goals. First, we seek to confirm the prior findings on perceived stress and age with a much larger sample (over 1.5 million) from the same Gallup-Healthways survey mentioned above, covering the years 2010 through 2015. Second, we seek to confirm the pattern in two additional large-scale surveys that employed somewhat different methodologies. Third, we attempt to identify potential explanatory mechanisms that produce the age—stress relationship. Several variables in the Gallup-Healthways dataset that are associated with age will be examined and tested for their ability to impact the observed age—stress pattern.

Section snippets

Gallup-Healthways well-being index survey

Since January 2008, the Gallup Organization and Healthways Inc. have conducted a telephone survey of approximately 1000 people per day using sampling that includes both landlines and cell phones. Because there were political questions placed prior to the well-being assessments in the first two years of the survey, that may have contaminated the well-being assessments through a context effect [15], the data analyzed here includes surveys that were collected from January 2010 through 2015

Perceived stress in Gallup-Healthways survey, American Time Use Survey, and Health and Retirement Study

In the Gallup-Healthways survey, > 45% of young respondents reported “stress during A LOT OF THE DAY yesterday,” whereas the incidence was only 25% in the older years. Fig. 1 presents means (and 95% confidence intervals in grey) for each year of age (F(65, 1,365,788) = 857.2, p < 0.0001, with age in years as a nominal predictor variable). Without any control variables, Fig. 1 shows that the decline in percentage of respondents reporting stress begins in the mid 40s, accelerates downward at about age

Discussion

Analyses reported in this paper demonstrate that the association between age and daily stress is robust: a large decline in stress from about age 50 through age 85 is shown in a large sample of the Gallup-Healthways survey. This pattern is confirmed in analyses of the American Time Use Survey and in the Health and Retirement Survey, replicating earlier analyses from a much smaller Gallup-Healthways sample [1] and demonstrating its generalizability.

The stress-age pattern, in part, inversely

Funding

This work was supported, in part, by NIA grants AG042407, AG040629, and AG005842.

Conflict of interests

A.A.S. is a Senior Scientist with the Gallup Organization and a consultant with Adelphi Values, inc.

Acknowledgements

We thank Professor Angus Deaton for comments on an early draft of this paper.

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