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Your Response to Stress Improves as You Grow Older
变老的好处：年龄越大，压力也会减少

No one is a stranger to stress.Decades of research make it clear that major life events, such as the death of a loved one or the start of a new job, can take a lot of our energy and attention.But recently scientists have begun to reveal how smaller daily stressors can create substantial difficulties.

David Almeida, a developmental psychologist at Pennsylvania State University, has been following the stressors of daily life in a group of more than 3,000 adults since 1995.

Almeida spoke with editor Daisy Yuhas to describe a benefit of aging that he has uncovered: stress levels go down and coping skills may actually go up after people pass their 20s.

Q: You’ve been tracking people’s daily experiences for two decades.How has that shifted your perspective as a psychologist?

A: In my work, I try to characterize a day in the life of an individual.I look at how people use their time, how they experience stressors and positive events, their mood and their physical symptoms.I chart how this changes from day to day — the ebb and flow of daily experiences.So even though I’m a psychologist, my unit of analysis is a day, not a person.

The more I’ve dug into this work, the more I’ve begun to see that people actually differ from themselves day to day as much as you differ from somebody else.Our identity isn’t just who we are based on the average of our experiences.Our identities may be in the range in our behavior, the extent to which we’re going up and down with our experiences.

Q: How do you track daily stressors?

A: We ask people to answer a series of structured questions at the end of every day.Originally we used telephone calls, and now we use web-based approaches.We ask about how they spent their time, their mood, their physical symptoms, who they interacted with, and then we ask a lot of questions about the types of stressors they experienced that day.

For some studies, we also collect a sample of saliva, which lets us determine the amount of stress hormones in the body.

With that method, we’ve worked with a large group of people.

Q: You recently published findings from an analysis of 2,845 adults — ages 22 to 77 at the start — over 20 years.In that work, you found that people seem less stressed as they grow older.Can you unpack that?

A: Yes, finally some good news about daily stress!It seems to get a little bit better.We find that younger people report more exposure to stressful events — things they find challenging, upsetting or disruptive — than older people do.

So people in their 20s may report stressors on at least 40 to 45 percent of days, but by the time they’re in their 70s, that goes down to maybe 20 to 25 percent of days.

In addition, we looked at how much distress people experience or the way they respond to stress.Here we see the same type of pattern, with young adults having higher distress on days with stressors than older people.But around 55 years old, that age advantage — where your response to stress gets better with age — starts to taper off and plateau.

Q: On a practical note, should we be trying to remove all stressors from our daily lives?

A: There’s something that might actually be good about having some daily stress.People who report having no stress in their lives — you think they are lucky, happy people.But they also report fewer positive things in their lives.They have fewer people in their lives and perform worse on cognitive tests.

It’s the reactivity to stress — how you respond to it — that really matters to your health and well-being.It’s not the number of stressors but actually your emotional responses that can, for example, raise your risk of cardiovascular disease, increase inflammation and contribute to dying earlier.