Skip to content
Health
Link copied to clipboard

How stressed out are Philadelphians?

If Twitter is right, Hialeah, Florida is the most stressed U.S. city.

Pennsylvania ranks 20th in the country for stress; Philadelphia is more stressed out than Pittsbugh.
Pennsylvania ranks 20th in the country for stress; Philadelphia is more stressed out than Pittsbugh.Read moreKonstantin Postumitenko / Getty Images

Sunday mornings are supposed to be relaxing, spiritual, and a time to kick back from work and enjoy the day.

So why are Pennsylvanians so stressed?

Babylon Health, a London-based subscription health provider, determined that the Commonwealth is the 17th most stressed state in the country by looking at posts on Twitter.

The health group analyzed about 5 million real-time tweets over a two-week period. They looked at 100 of the most populated cities in the U.S. to find out who is tweeting about stress, their frustrations and anxiety.

The group kept track of what day of the week users tweeted about stress and whether the tweets posted in the morning, afternoon or evening to determine the most stressful time periods. Their rankings were based on the locations with the highest proportion of tweet classified as “moderately stressed” by an detection tool that analyzed the words used.

In Pennsylvania, users were most stressed on Sunday mornings, according to the Babylon Heath survey.

To add to that, a Gallup Poll released Thursday found that in 2018 America was one of the more stressed out countries in the world. The poll reported 55 percent of Americans said they experienced stress a lot during the previous day, with 45 percent saying they worried a lot more and 22 percent feeling a lot of anger.

Alaska was ranked the most stressed state with 11.69 percent of the state’s tweets classified as stressful. Alaska residents were most tense on Friday mornings, according to the group.

New Jersey is .01 percent more stressed than Pennsylvania, but residents of the Garden State pick Wednesday evening to get worked up.

You would think that hump day would help, right? Not in New Jersey.

Babylon Health also looked at how stressed out cities were. Hialeah, Fla., San Bernardino, Calif., and North Las Vegas, Nev. lead the nation as the three most stressed out locations, according to the group. Philadelphia ranked 39th out of 100 cities, sandwiched between Los Angeles and Phoenix.

In Philly, Sixers games stressed residents out.

Evidently, attending camp in Pennsylvania can also be stressful.

Americans, as it turns out, have reasons to be stressed.

In 2017, the American Psychology Association commissioned a survey to look at the impact stress has across the country. They found Americans felt the “future of the nation” and the state of health care were significant sources of stress.

The next year, the APA looked at stress among Generation Z (those born from the mid-90s to the early 2000s) and found three-quarters of them reported that shootings were a significant source of stress in their life with more than half “experiencing stress at the possibility of a mass shooting occurring in their own school.”

Babylon Health released its National Stress survey just in time to recognize that April is Stress Awareness Month.

April is most famous for April Fools Day but there are also National Peanut Butter and Jelly Day, (April 2), National Wear Your Pajamas to Work Day (April 16) and National Hairball Awareness Day (last Friday in April).