Gallup Poll: MA 5th Most Stressed Out State

Monday, April 29, 2013

Ashley Klann, GoLocalWorcester Contributor

A new poll from Gallup reveals that Bay State residents are a bunch of worry warts. According to their most recent ranking, Massachusetts is facing the fifth highest levels of stress in the country.

While the Commonwealth’s ranking in this Gallup poll didn’t change since last year (also fifth place), the figures did shift. Last year’s rankings showed that 42.6 percent of those polled in Mass. agreed they were stressed out. In this year’s ranking, that number has bumped up to 43.4 percent.

Nationwide, 40.6 percent of Americans reported feeling stressed in 2012, similar to past years, according to the survey.

Methodology

Gallup polled residents, asking “Did you experience the following feelings during a lot of the day yesterday? How about stress?”

The state-level data was based on daily surveys of residents throughout the year from January to December 2012. In total, their methodology included over 350,000 interviews as part of the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index.

Gallup started tracking stressed out states in 2008 and has been cataloguing the figures since.

The Most Stressed Out States

Residents of West Virginia reported the highest levels of stress, according to the poll, with a 47.1 percent responding positively to Gallup’s question. The Commonwealth’s neighbor to the south, Rhode Island, came in at number two, with 46.3 percent. Kentucky was next with 44 percent. Utah came in fourth with a close figure, and Mass. landed fifth.

West Virginia, Kentucky, and Utah, have each ranked within the top five most stressed states for the past five years. West Virginia ranked as the most stressed state in 2012, Kentucky was the top state for stress in 2008 and 2011, and Utah was the top state for stress in 2009 and 2010.

According to Gallup’s figures, regionally, states with stress levels at or above 42% were clustered in the Northeast and Midwest, but also included Utah, Oregon, and Washington.

The Low End

Hawaii has secured its top spot for another year – a full five percent above the number two state. Only 32 percent of Hawaii residents reported stress levels.

Hawaii has ranked as the state with the lowest percentage of residents reporting stress on the prior day all five years and is the only state to rank in the top five consistently since 2008.

Louisiana came in second with 37 percent. Mississippi was only a few tenths of a percent behind its neighbor in the deep South. Iowa was the fourth least-stressed state at 38 percent, and Wyoming was fifth.

Facts Behind the Figures

According to Gallup, a strong correlation between stress levels and enjoyment appeared in the data.
“Two of the five states with the lowest stress levels, Hawaii and Wyoming, also boasted the highest levels of enjoyment in 2012. In Hawaii, 89.7 percent of residents said they experienced enjoyment the day before the survey and 88.8 percent said so in Wyoming,” they said.

In their poll of states experiencing the least enjoyment, Rhode Island landed at number one, with 80.4 percent of the population answering negatively when asked whether they had experienced enjoyment yesterday.

Residents in other high-stress states, Kentucky and West Virginia, were also among the least likely to experience enjoyment. Both of these states have appeared among the bottom five states for experiencing enjoyment at least three times since Gallup began reporting this measure, including 2012.

Utah’s results threw them off, however, as a state that is commonly ranked among both the highest stress and highest enjoyment, “suggesting a complex relationship between stress and other emotions,” Gallup said.

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