A recent study out of Penn State1 found that experiences of daily stress decrease as people age.
The study looked at people ages 25–74 over a 20-year period. It found the number of days containing a stressful event to be much higher among the 25-year-olds (nearly half of all days) than among the 70-year-olds (about a third of all days).
“There’s something about growing old that leads to fewer stressors,” David Almeida, Ph.D., study author and professor of development and human studies at Penn State, said in a statement. “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.”
Almeida also found that on days that contained stressors, individuals were less affected by them as they got older. While a decrease in reports of, and reactivity to, daily stressors, was observed into the mid-50s, aging into the late 60s and early 70s may bring more challenges and slight increases in the number of daily stressors.
The authors did note that this data, which was collected between 1995 and 2015, notably excludes one majorly stressful time period for the elderly—the COVID-19 pandemic. The study is still ongoing, so future reporting on COVID-19-era data might look very different.
