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[Angrboda]

Gallup: the world is stressed, worried, sad and in pain

Last year, global levels of unhappiness reached their highest point in more than a decade, according to the latest annual Gallup Global Emotions report, which was released earlier this week.

For the report, Gallup conducted interviews in 2017 with more than 154,000 adults in more than 145 countries to assess the emotional lives of people around the world. People were asked if they had experienced worry, stress, physical pain, anger or sadness for “a lot of the day” on the day before the survey.

More respondents answered “yes” than in any survey since 2005, raising the global “negative experience index” to a new high of 30. That was two points higher than in 2016.



Specifically, 38 percent of the people surveyed said they had experienced a lot of worry and 37 percent said they had experienced significant stress. Both figures were two percentages points higher than in the survey conducted in 2016.

More people also said they had felt physical pain (31 percent), an increase of 1 percent over 2016. Sadness also rose slightly to 23 percent.

The only negative emotion that stayed unchanged was anger (20 percent).