No one is a stranger to stress. Decades of research have clearly shown that major life events, such as the death of a spouse or starting a new job, take a lot of our energy and attention. But recently, scientists have made progress in understanding how smaller, everyday stressors affect our mood and experience. David AlmeidaA developmental psychologist and professor of human development and family studies at Penn State University, since 1995 has been tracking a group of more than 3,000 adults about their daily stressors. Almeida talks to Mind Matters editor Daisy Yuhas about some of the silver linings he’s uncovered about aging—and how national or global events can tip the scales against us.
[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]
For twenty years, you’ve been tracking people’s everyday experiences. How has this changed your perspective as a psychologist?
My work tries to depict a day in a person’s life. I observe how people spend their time, how they experience stressors and positive events, their emotional and physical symptoms. I charted how this changed from day to day, and the ebb and flow of daily experience. So although I am a psychologist, my unit of analysis is the sky, not the person.
The more I researched this work, the more I began to see that people are actually different from themselves every day, just like you are different from everyone else. Our identities are not just who we are based on our average experience – our identities may be in the range of our behavior, the extent to which we ebb and flow with our experiences.
How do you track your daily stressors?
We asked people to answer a series of structured questions at the end of each day. Initially we used the phone, now we use a web-based approach. We ask them how they spend their time, their moods, their physical symptoms, who they interact with, and then ask a lot of questions about the types of stressors they’re experiencing that day. For some studies, we also collected saliva samples, which allowed us to determine the amount of stress hormones in the body.
With this approach, we work with a large group of people.I have to admit, great participants National Everyday Experience Study– This is a project called American middle age— who have shared their lives with me over the past 20 years. It is an honor to follow them.
You recently published an analysis of 2,845 adults (initial ages 22 to 77) over 20 years. In that work, you found that people seemed to be less stressed as they got older. Can you open the package?
Yes, good news about everyday stress is finally here! It seems to be getting better.we found young people Report more exposure stress incidents– Things people find challenging, frustrating, or disruptive compared to older adults. So someone in their 20s might report a stressor at least 40 to 45 percent of their days, but by the time you’re in your 70s, that might drop down to 20 to 25 percent of your days.
Plus, we looked at how much pain people experienced — or how they to respond Emphasize. Here we see the same type of pattern, with younger people suffering more on days with stressors than older people. But around age 55, the age advantage — your response to stress that gets better with age — starts to wane and stabilize.
Why is there an age advantage in dealing with stress?
I think three reasons work together. One of them has to do with the social roles people play. When you’re young, those roles might include being a parent to young children, starting a job, and forming new relationships. New roles can be stressful, and role conflicts can occur when you take on multiple roles at once.
The second reason may be that as we get older we realize we only have so much left in our life and want to make the most of it – so we are very motivated to enjoy it.
The third reason, and the one that interests me the most, is that it is through experience, opportunity, and past stressors that we learn how to deal with them, and as we age we become more expert at dealing with everyday stressors.
Does this explain why research shows older people are happier Than younger?
As people age, you can make a list of all these things you shouldn’t expect, like declining physical health, losing friends, getting sick, and cognitive decline. These are not things you would expect to be associated with increased happiness.But we see over and over again that as people age, they have Increase life satisfaction.
That said, this pattern will stop at some point. Later in life — in the 80s or 90s — I think what we’re seeing is a very difficult time to live in, life satisfaction is declining.
How do factors such as economic and political uncertainty in the context of our lives affect our day-to-day stress?
We were able to study the impact of the 2008 recession and the post-recession period.Looking at our data, it is clear that adults in 2010 compared to 1995 Daily life is more stressful And made more miserable by these experiences. Our hypothesis is that this reflects historical changes, such as economic downturns and the use of technologies that alter social interactions. From this we can speculate on how recessions and other changes will affect us. In future work, we’d like to see what the pandemic has done – we probably won’t see much of an age advantage, for example, in this period.
But what really surprised us about our analysis of the 2008 recession was that this difference in stress seemed to be concentrated in middle age. I would have expected young people just starting their careers and senior retirees to be the worst off. But no, it was adults in their 40s to 60s who reported higher levels of psychological distress. I think it has to do with the social roles of middle-aged adults. They worry about their children, and they worry about their parents.
In fact, should we try to eliminate all stressors from our daily lives?
Taking some stress on a daily basis may actually have benefits. People who report having no stress in their lives, you consider them lucky, happy people.but they also report less positive things in their lives. They lived with fewer people and performed worse on cognitive tests.
this is reactivity Stress — how you respond to it — is really important to your health and well-being. It is not the number of stressors that cause cardiovascular disease, but your emotional responses, increase inflammation with contributes to an early death.
How should we manage our responses?
There are some things people can do alone – like eating well and getting a good night’s sleep. But we need to remember that not everyone can do it. It’s not just a personal choice.
We found that minority groups by race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation had higher stress reactivity. They don’t always have the resources to cope with daily stress on their own. For example, when your body is under stress, it wants to mobilize energy. So if you get up and go for a walk, that’s the best way to stop that emotional response. But many people can’t get up in the middle of the workday to go for a walk outside.
We need to start talking about how to provide resources to empower people so they can take care of themselves.
Are you a scientist specializing in neuroscience, cognitive science or psychology? Have you read a recent peer-reviewed paper and you want to write an article for Mind Matters?Please send suggestions to scientific americanDaisy Yuhas, Editor, Mind Matters exist pitchmindmatters@gmail.com.
