The Most & Least ‘Stressed-Out’ States

Across the US, suicide rates, drug overdoses and other “deaths of despair” are soaring – and recently contributed to the third-straight year of life-expectancy decline. Meanwhile, millennials, saddled with debt and suffering with a paucity of marketable skills, are putting off parenthood and homeownership as they toil away in expensive urban centers, surrendering more than half of their monthly income to rent and debt service.

With the outlook on the future of American society as grim as it has ever been (thanks to widening economic inequality, the dire warnings of climate alarmists, and the erosion of confidence in American institutions, among other reasons), it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Americans – particularly young Americans – are extremely stressed out.

Though stress can be an amorphous concept, researchers at WalletHub have tried to quantify stress-level trends across the US, incorporating data from average hours worked per week to personal bankruptcy rate to share of adults getting adequate sleep and using these data to assign a score to individual states.

Their study turned up an interesting result: It showed that states in the Deep South tended to be the most stressed, followed by expensive coastal states like New York and California, with the sleepy Midwest and plain states bringing up the rear.