A new research study led by David Almeida, a professor at Penn State University, has found that the number of daily stressors and people’s reactivity to them decreases with age.
The study, published in the journal Developmental Psychology, used data from the National Study of Daily Experiences, a comprehensive study that has collected data on daily life from over 40,000 days in the lives of more than 3,000 adults across a 20-year period. Respondents were between the ages of 25 and 74 when the study began and were invited to participate from the larger Midlife in the United States project led by the University of Wisconsin–Madison Institute on Aging.
The researchers noted a decrease in the effects of daily stress in both the number of daily stressors that people reported and their emotional reactivity to them. For example, 25-year-olds reported stressors on nearly 50% of days, while 70-year-olds reported stressors on only 30% of days. In addition to the decrease in the number of daily stressors reported, the research team also found that as people age, they are less emotionally reactive to daily stressors when they do happen. The researchers observed that daily stress steadily decreases until the mid-50s, when people are the least affected by stress exposures.
While these findings show a decrease in reports of and reactivity to daily stressors into the mid-50s, Almeida notes that early indicators show that older age, into the late 60s and early 70s, may bring more challenges and a slight increase in instances of daily stress. The next round of data collection for the Midlife in the United States project, which will include the first data collection since the COVID-19 pandemic began in early 2020, will allow the research team to assess the impact of the pandemic on daily stress reactivity and further study how people grow and change during adulthood.
This research was supported by the Penn State’s Survey Research Center and the Center for Healthy Aging in the College of Health and Human Development.