America’s Most Stressed—and Most Chill—Cities

“Each city shares some common causes for stress, like noise, people, competition, traffic, but they also diverge into their own special pain points,” says self-described “stress coach” Jordan Friedman in New York City, author of “The Stress Manager’s Manual.”

So which cities are sending their residents’ collective anxiety to pandemic levels? Our remarkably chill data team pulled together a list of 11 metrics that we think give a pretty good indication:

Housing affordability, signaled by price-to-income ratio
Rent
Average hours of sleep
Average work hours
Percentage of people who commute more than 45 minutes to work
Unemployment rate
Percentage of people who live below the poverty line
Divorce rate
Number of yoga and meditation centers per capita
Percentage of people in “poor” or “fair” health (46% of Americans cite health concerns as a leading cause of stress)
Percentage of people who don’t think “having as much fun as possible” is important, according to a 2016 Nielsen poll.

Read full article