What is the least stressful phase of life?

Saturday, December 17, 2023.

Research reveals that humans report feeling a decline in stress as a human moves through time,move becoming older and more chill in the process.

Aging humans have fewer stressful experiences, and they deal with whatever stress they do experience much better than when they were younger.

On the other hand, Middle age humans are way more stressed nowadays than they were 20 years ago.

Professor David Almeida, the study’s first author, said:

“There’s something about growing old that leads to fewer stressors.

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.”

How the study was conducted

This was a longitudinal research study which that tracked over 3,000 humans as they moved through 2 decades of time.

• Researchers discovered that the number of stressful events tends to taper off as we age.

• For example, a typical 25-year-old experiences a stressful event every other day, but a typical 70-year-old only faces one every three days or so.

• People also became less reactive to stress as they go older.

Professor Almeida said:

“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.”

The data suggests, though, that into the late 60s and 70s there is a slight uptick in stressful events.

Professor Almeida said:

“Growing older from 35 to 65 is very different than growing older from 65 to 95,.

We’ve started to see that in the data already, but this next round of data collection and analysis will give us an even greater understanding of what that looks like.

At the end of the next post-pandemic data collection in a couple of years, I’ll be in my early 60s, and when I started this project, I was in my late 20s.

My own development has occurred during this study of midlife, and it has been enlightening to watch these findings play out in my own life.”

Final thoughts…

Professor Almeida highlighted the fact that it is not just how much stress we face, but how we deal with it:

“A lot of my prior work looked at these small, daily stressors — being late to a meeting, having an argument with a partner, caring for a sick child — and found that our emotional responses to these events are predictive of later health and well-being, including chronic conditions, mental health and even mortality.

With this new research, it’s encouraging to see that as we age, we begin to deal with these stressors better.

On average, the experience of daily stress won’t get worse, but in fact get better.”

Be well, stay kind, and Godspeed.

RESEARCH:

Almeida, D. M., Rush, J., Mogle, J., Piazza, J. R., Cerino, E., & Charles, S. T. (2023). Longitudinal change in daily stress across 20 years of adulthood: Results from the national study of daily experiences. Developmental Psychology, 59(3), 515–523. https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0001469