We’re no longer at our unhappiest during middle age
People used to experience an “unhappiness hump” around midlife, but declining youth mental health may mean that is no longer the case
By Christa Lesté-Lasserre
27 August 2025
Our degree of contentment changes with age
Simon Dawson/Bloomberg via Getty Images
We used to get especially dissatisfied with life during middle age, creating an “unhappiness hump” nestled between the more contented periods of youth and older age – but that’s no longer the case.
This proverbial hump has now disappeared, not because people are happier in midlife, but because young people are less happy than they used to be, says Alex Bryson at University College London.
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“We find stress has been rising amongst most people under about the age of 40, and rising much more quickly the lower down the age range you go,” he says. “So we see a tilting of distress over time, with the younger getting more and more distressed.”
Previous research based on data from 145 countries suggested that people were happiest up to age 30 and after age 70, with unhappiness peaking at about 50 years old. Similar trends even seem to apply to orangutans and chimpanzees.
But Bryson and his colleagues noticed that the unhappiness hump seemed to have disappeared, based on data from national mental health surveys in the US, which involved 10 million adults from 1993 to 2024, and in the UK, which looked at 40,000 households from 2009 to 2023.
