When pop icon Taylor Swift said she ‘couldn’t have asked for a better year’ back in December, the internet had one question: what version of 2017 had she been living in?
By most accounts, 2017 was not a good year.
It brought us two devastating hurricanes in Houston and Puerto Rico, the deadliest shooting in American history in Las Vegas and the deaths of cultural icons like Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington and The Sopranos’ Frank Vincent, among other things.
Now a new poll has revealed that happiness in the US took a nosedive in 2017 as Americans’ well-being, generally defined as ‘a state of being comfortable, healthy and happy’, hit record lows.
The map above shows the 21 states that saw an decrease in resident well-being in 2017 (shown in black). All of the remaining 29 states’ scores remained the same from 2016 (shown in gray)
Overall, the nation’s well-being score fell from 62.1 out of 100 in 2016 to 61.5 out of 100 in 2017, according to the poll by Gallup-Sharecare.
The poll also found that in 21 US states there was a decline in residents’ well-being compared with 2016 levels.
Additionally, not a single state saw an increase in well-being in 2017 for the first time in the 10-year history of the poll.
That’s the largest number of states to see a drop in well-being in over 10 years, shattering the previous record of 15 states after the Great Recession in 2009.
The polling data comes from interviews with more than 160,000 US adults in all 50 states, conducted from January to December 2017.
The ‘Well-Being Index’ is calculated based on what Gallup calls the ‘five essential elements of well-being’:
- Purpose: liking what you do each day and being motivated to achieve your goals
- Social: having supportive relationships and love in your life
- Financial: managing your economic life to reduce stress and increase security
- Community: liking where you live, feeling safe and having pride in your community
- Physical: having good health and enough energy to get things done daily
The states taking the two bottom spots in the 2017 rankings were Arkansas and Louisiana.
The third lowest was West Virginia, which has had the lowest well-being score in the country for nine years in a row.
Ten of the 21 states that in their well-being score in 2017 were located in the southeast region of the country including states like Texas, Missouri, Georgia and Virginia.
The entire west coast and two bordering states also experienced a dip in well-being.
The full list of states that saw the decline is as follows: Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Maine, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Missouri and Ohio.
Gallup said the declines were primarily driven by worsening scores in measures of mental health, purpose and social well-being.
In the states that saw an overall decline, residents were more likely to report experiencing significant worry on any given day and less likely to report of receiving ‘positive energy’ from friends and family members,
They were also more likely to report diagnoses of clinical depression.
South Dakota and Vermont led the nation’s well-being rankings for the first time in the history of the Gallup-Sharecare poll, both with a well-being score of 64.1 out of 100 in 2017.
Their scores were unchanged from the previous year.
Hawaii, which has claimed the top spot in the poll six times in the last 10 years including 2016, came in third with a score of 63.4.
The findings have widespread implications in part because research has shown that compared to workers with lower well-being, those with higher well-being perform better in the workplace and are better at adapting to change.
They are also less likely to take unplanned time off and will contribute more to the success of their organizations and communities, Gallup said.
Gallup released a statement with the poll results on Tuesday regarding the importance of the findings.
‘State and community leaders can study and adopt best practices from states with consistently high well-being scores, such as Hawaii, South Dakota and Vermont, in order to maximize the chances that their own constituents are best able to lead a life well lived,’ it said.