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If you’re middle-aged and you’re thinking, “I don’t remember everyone being this angry and miserable 20 or 30 years ago,” you’re not wrong.
Yes, our mind plays tricks on us and yes, we often look at the past through rose-tinted spectacles. But a recent study confirms what many people in later middle age already feel: We really are much more stressed than middle-aged people were back in the 1990s.
It’s official. We’re miserable.
“[A]mong middle-aged adults [the] proportion of stressor days increased by 19%, and perceived risks to finances and to future plans rose by 61% and 52% respectively,” write psychology researchers in a study to be published in the American Psychologist, the journal of the American Psychology Association.
(Stressor days means days on which subjects reported a lot of stress.)
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The researchers, led by David Almeida, a psychologist and professor of human development at Pennsylvania State University, based their findings on daily surveys of around 1,500 people in the 1990s and about 800 early last decade. It’s part of the National Study of Daily Experiences, a multi-university study sponsored by the National Institutes of Health.
The findings “surprised us,” admits Almedia. “Everyone experiences a little bit more [stress], he says, “but [in] midlife it’s a lot more.”
To be sure, the data studied are from 2011 to 2013, in the aftermath of the financial crisis, and now more than seven years ago. Until a few months ago, the economy had improved dramatically since then. On the other hand, if you look around the U.S., you’d be hard-pressed to say that it was becoming happier.
And that’s even before this year’s shocking developments.
Why do things feel worse? Almeida notes the biggest and most obvious change. “We have increases in technology, more access to information and more access to entertainment,” he says. “It could be that that technology doesn’t allow us to disengage from work, or from people who are stressing us out. The ability to compartmentalize life has now dwindled. The technology that’s useful at giving us information and keeping us entertained could also be giving us stress.”
(Almeida is contemplating conducting research on how social media is affecting people’s mood.)
It’s not new that people in middle age find life more stressful than the young and the old. Psychologists have long found that to be the case. Human happiness, many have found, seems to follow a shallow “U” shape through life, bottoming around age 50 before slowly rising again.
“Being in the middle means more than just being in the middle of adulthood,” Almeida says. “It means being in the middle of generations. Midlife is a time when we are responsible for more people.” Those in middle age have to deal with children, aging parents, and responsibility at work, he adds.
The good news? As we get older our levels of stress will go down again. We’ll be happier in retirement than we are in our 40s and 50s, even with health issues. Older people, says Almeida, experience fewer stressors and are able to cope with them better.
That’s for two reasons, he adds: “Life lived…and life left.”
“Lived lived” means experience, he says. “There’s something about the wisdom of age. As we grow older, we learn to deal with these minor stresses better.”
As for “life left”—the older we get, the more precious our remaining time seems. “You want to maximize the quality of the time you have left,” Almeida says. He compares it to someone in the final days of a two-week vacation. You don’t want to waste any time.
In other words, Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau had it wrong. The movie should have been “Grumpy Middle-Aged Men,” not “Grumpy Old Men.”
Meanwhile, what can those of us in middle age do to deal with stress as we wait for the day we can kick back?
Yes, we can try being more mindful of what is causing us stress and of how we feel, and we can try focusing on the positive purpose in our lives, Almeida says.
But the simplest answer is to move more, he adds.
“My advice to people is to move when you are exposed to stress,” he says. “Moving, physical activity, is probably the best stress reducer.”
It doesn’t have to mean major exercise either. “Just walking around” is enough, he adds. Stress was hard-wired into our system as a primitive response to physical danger. Scientific studies of human biology, says Almeida, have found that “on days that you move more, you are less grumpy.”
