Every year since the mid-2000s, Gallup has asked people around the world a blunt question about the previous day: did you experience stress during a lot of it? Worry? Sadness? Enjoyment? Tracked across the 88 countries that were surveyed in at least twelve of the fourteen years before the pandemic, the answers describe a planet whose evenings grew steadily heavier — years before 2020 gave everyone a reason.
Yesterday, worldwide: negative feelings climbed for a decade
Average share reporting each feeling "during a lot of the day yesterday," across the same 88 countries each year (each country counted once, weighted within country). Hover for values.
Stress rose from 26 percent of adults in 2008 to 37 percent in 2019 — a forty-percent increase in eleven years, with not a single down year after 2010. Worry climbed in near-lockstep, from 32 to 39 percent. Sadness and anger drifted up more gently. And enjoyment, the line you would expect to fall if the world were simply describing worse lives, stayed flat at about 71 percent throughout.
That last fact matters. People did not stop having good days; they started having tense ones. The pattern — negative affect up, positive affect stable — is the same signature American data show over the same period, and it is hard to reconcile with a purely economic explanation: the series begins at the bottom of the global financial crisis and rises straight through the recovery.
Where the decade hit hardest — all 88 countries
Each tile is one country's share reporting stress, 2008–2019 (same vertical scale, 0–70%). Sorted by change from the first three years to the last three. Hover a tile for details.
The geography is striking. The steepest climbs are concentrated in the Sahel and East Africa — Burkina Faso, Niger, Rwanda, Chad and Tanzania all rose by 28 points or more — alongside collapsing Venezuela (+27). These are also places where conflict, displacement, and food insecurity worsened over the decade; their lines look less like a mood and more like a seismograph. At the other end, only four countries finished meaningfully calmer than they started, and the largest improvement on Earth (the Philippines, down 12 points) would rank as merely ordinary among the increases.
One more line completes the picture: dispersion. The spread of life ratings within countries — the gap between each society's most and least contented citizens — widened steadily over the same years, from a standard deviation of 2.17 in 2008 to 2.64 in 2019 across this panel. The decade did not simply press down evenly; it pulled the texture of daily life apart.
The usual honesty: these 88 countries are the well-surveyed ones — stable enough to poll every year — so the trend likely understates the world's roughest places. Each country counts equally in the average regardless of population; this is "the average country's stress," not "the average human's," since the extract lacks the population weights a true global headcount needs. Both framings rose; the question is only how much.