Are you feeling stressed right now? As 2012 gets under way, plenty of people would probably say “yes.” But when the American Psychological Association recently posed this question, the results were distinctly surprising.

Although 22 per cent of Americans described themselves as “very stressed”, this figure was slightly down on the previous year, when it was 24 per cent – and well below 2007, when it was 32 per cent. Indeed, the measured levels of stress have been dropping steadily over the past five years since the APA started its survey. In 2007, for example, the mean stress level was 6.2 per cent, whereas this year it was “only” 5.2 per cent.

At first glance, this looks odd. America has hardly seen a story of economic growth in the past five years. On the contrary, when the APA first conducted this survey (in summer 2007) the economy was in the midst of a boom. Even in the summer of 2008 a full-blown slump seemed unlikely, and the Lehman Brothers shock still lay ahead. And while there are signs that the US economy has now improved slightly compared with the severe downturn in 2009, this improvement has mostly occurred after the 2011 survey. Last autumn, US unemployment was well above 9 per cent – twice the level in the (most stressed) summer of 2007.