American Stress Levels Reaching New Highs

If you haven't noticed, the country is totally stressed out. But just how stressed are Americans these days?

Researchers have followed the stress levels of Americas for decades and according to recent data from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA, stress is running rampant.

Women increased their stress by 18% while men increased by 24% from 1983 to 2009 in a study analyzing data from more than 6,300 people.

This is considered the first-ever historical comparison of stress levels across the United States and has been published online in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology.

“The data suggest there's been an increase in stress over that time [of 1983 to 2009],” says psychologist and lead author Sheldon Cohen who is director of Carnegie Mellon's Laboratory for the Study of Stress, Immunity and Disease.

So who were the most stressed individuals? Women and those with lower incomes and less education all had higher stress levels. The study also showed that as people age, their stress decreases.

Cohen has studied the relationship between stress and disease for 35 years and says that the older you get, the less stress you have than you had the decade before.

From USA Today,

All three surveys used the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS), a measure Cohen and others created in 1983 to assess the degree to which situations in life are perceived as stressful. Each survey respondent answered a series of questions designed to evaluate their stress levels; researchers used the scale to analyze responses and calculate an overall score. Higher scores indicate greater psychological stress.

As a whole, the results indicate the stress in almost every demographic category from 1983 to 2009, has increased substantially, ranging from 10% to 30%.

White, middle-aged men with college degrees and full-time jobs were the group most affected by the economic downturn. According to Cohen that specific group's stress levels increased nearly twice as much as any other group.

Psychiatrist David Speigel, director of the Center on Stress and Health at Stanford University School of Medicine in Stanford, CA says this recent stress study is a good measurement of subjective stress and investigates the sources of much of society's stress. Spiegal says that comparatively, when looking at data from the early 1980s to today, you can see “economic pressures are greater, and it's harder to turn off information, and it's harder to buffer ourselves from the world.”

It is important to understand that stress levels are not just a mental or emotional issue, but an whole body attack. Stress is the body's reaction to any change which requires a response or adjustment. So although you might think “it's all in your head,” you are misguided. Stress affects one's entire body, as stress-related tension can cause the person to become sick, exhausted, run-down and/or even severely ill.

According to WebMD.com, 43% of all adults suffer adverse health effects from stress. Stress can play a significant role in such health ailments like headaches, high blood pressure, diabetes, asthma, depression, arthritis, and serious heart problems while research suggests that stress can also bring on or worsen certain symptoms or diseases.

So how do we limit our stress levels to continue living a happy and healthy life?

It is recommended to manage your stress properly by keeping a positive attitude, find time each day to relax and breathe, exercise regularly, eat healthy, get plenty of rest and sleep to allow for your body to recover from the exhausting levels of stress put on each day.