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Vitals: I’m stressed, you’re stressed, your partner is stressed, even our pets are stressed. But according a new survey from the American Psychological Association, the most stressed generation of adults in the nation is also the youngest. So-called “Millennials,” defined here as American adults ages 18 to 34, reported higher stress levels than their parents’ and grandparents’ generations, and more Millennials said that their stress level had increased in the last year. And 52 percent of this age group even said stress had kept them up at night.
8 comments:
Though I do have a little skepticism over the results because they were self-reported, I don't have a hard time believing that the newest generation is under a great amount of stress. I agree with the idea that alot of this stress comes from struggles of paying school debts and entering a job market, as I don't see the economy booming any time soon. As far as what young Americans do to relieve this stress, I also have don't have a hard the believing they are going about it the wrong way. I sense an air of laziness about the youngest generation and their abilities to cope with stress and have an effective result of dealing with it.
It seems to me that a lot of the findings in this article would be common sense. Of course the younger generation will be more stressed out. They're dealing with school, getting into colleges, getting good grades in those colleges, graduating and finding a job, paying off student loans, etc. A younger person also doesn't have a lot of mechanisms for coping with that stress, because they're not as experienced in handling mature situations. I also believe that technology has a lot to do with the stress levels of the younger generation. The older generation can leave their work behind and return home to relax. The younger generation, on the other hand, doesn't leave their work behind. e-mails, texts, and work follow them around through smart phones and laptops. It sounds like the younger generations need to learn how to cope with their new-found stress and how to leave their stress behind when relaxing.
Honestly I dont really see why this is news. The time of life between 18 and early thirties is when we are all trying to figure our lives out for ourselves. We are just learning how to live with out our parents and essentially fend for our selves in every way possible. Then we have to make the transition out of relative safety net that college provides for us and find our way in "the real world" where we have to work our way to where we want to be in our field professionally and then figure out what we want our family life to be like and possible start our on and then learn how to balance that with the work life we have established. Of coarse all that is going to be rather trying on any individual. And once you have that all figured out you probably start to calm down because by then you are pretty much settled and dont have to worry about "making it' any more.
I think this is an important topic, but not a very important article. Jess and April both talked about how this is not news- its common sense. That's because we're living with those facts- the idea of not coping with stress seems very real to us. However, I think this article would have hit home had it offered some suggestions or ways to improve on this so-called problem rather than just pointing it out. That doesn't really catch my attention or encourage me to consider my own life in a way that would confirm or refute the assertions of this study.
It does seem a little iffy that this information is based on "self-reported" stress, but at the same time it is true that once the brain tells itself it's stressed, then it becomes stressed. What a vicious circle. But I agree with April; this age group is experiencing the sudden, hard shift to adulthood. Parents are no longer running our lives, and we have to fend for ourselves in a bad economy and a world that demands more and more to be accomplished in each 24-hour period. We must somehow learn to find our identity and find stability amidst all of our struggling peers.
I find it very easy to believe that the millennials are the most stressed out generation. I am also a bit skeptical of the numbers, however i think that school has gotten more intense starting much earlier, and that the amount of work that kids have to deal with is much more than their parents and grandparents ever had to do in school. As a freshman, I can't exactly comment on the stress of heading into the real world, but i know that even at age 16 I was worrying about whether or not I could ever be a functional adult. When I've talked to my mother about this she said she used to think about it but she never got physically stressed out over school, money, work, and the future the way my sister and I both do.
Whoa, everyone is really hitting this article hard.
In response to a few people above: surveys are by definition "self-reported," so everyone who is critical of that fact and are using that as a way to discredit this study, you should probably start also writing up your in-depth critique of the US Census Bureau (whose data is all "self-reported"). A survey is, by definition, a process during which questions are asked of participants and their answers are recorded and compiled into a set of data from which some conclusions may or may not be able to be drawn. As a result of this process, there is always a margin of error because everything is self-reported. That's why some people were predicting tat Obama would lose in 2008, even though surveys were saying that he was ahead: people with racist tendencies might be less willing to tell the truth about whether they would vote for a black president on a written survey that someone else is going to see, as opposed to voting anonymously in a booth by yourself. Surveys are not hard facts; they simply provide a large set of data that can be looked at for trends, which is exactly what this article is describing.
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