State of the World’s Emotional Health 2025

What Is the State of the World’s Emotional Health?

The world is on an emotional edge. Gallup World Poll data show that in 2024, 39% of adults worldwide reported worrying for much of the previous day, and more than a third said they felt stressed. Compared with a decade ago, hundreds of millions more people now experience these emotions.

Negative emotions remain high.

• In 2024, 39% of adults worldwide reported experiencing a lot of worry the previous day.

• Similarly, 37% of adults reported experiencing a lot of stress the previous day.

• Fewer said they experienced daily physical pain (32%), sadness (26%) and anger (22%).

• All measures are higher than they were a decade ago.

Positive emotions are steady.

• Feeling treated with respect (88%) reached one of the highest levels Gallup has measured.

• Daily experiences of laughter (73%), enjoyment (73%) and feeling well-rested (72%) held at long-term averages.

• The 52% of adults saying they learned something interesting the previous day dipped slightly but remains higher than it was a decade ago.

Peace shapes emotions.

• Sadness, worry and anger were more common in less peaceful countries as measured by the Institute for Economics & Peace’s Global Peace Index.

• Anger, sadness and physical pain were higher in countries where scores on the Institute for Economics & Peace’s Positive Peace Index are weaker.

• Positive emotions such as enjoyment and feeling respected were less common in countries with weaker scores on either index.

Understanding the Connection Between Peace and Emotional Wellbeing

The inaugural State of the World’s Emotional Health report pairs Gallup data on daily emotional “vital signs” with the Institute for Economics & Peace’s Global Peace Index and Positive Peace Index to show how peace and emotional wellbeing intersect — in contexts of conflict and in the conditions that sustain peace.

While these metrics provide essential lenses to world peace, Gallup research adds an aspect that these indexes cannot: how people feel.

For nearly two decades, Gallup World Poll surveys in more than 140 countries and areas have tracked daily emotions such as worry, anger, sadness, stress and enjoyment.

These emotional wellbeing indicators tie to peace because they reveal risks that affect both stability and health. Daily emotions may serve as warning signals for leaders because how people feel each day has real consequences for health.

Prolonged stress, for example, contributes to chronic disease and shorter life expectancy. Conflict and fragility intensify these risks by undermining health at every level. For this reason, the World Health Organization identifies peace as a determinant of health — outcomes most at risk in fragile and conflict-affected states.

By examining emotions directly alongside peace, this report highlights how closely these dimensions are connected and gives leaders a new way to read risk and to build more stable, healthier societies.

The following sections show the trends in how negative and positive emotions have shifted over the past decade, offering leaders a clearer view of where distress is deepening, where wellbeing persists, and what this could mean for the world’s emotional health.

Global Trends: Daily Negative Emotions

In 2024, Gallup asked adults worldwide whether they had experienced five negative emotions during much of the previous day:

• Worry (39%) and stress (37%) topped the list, followed by physical pain (32%), sadness (26%) and anger (22%).

Except for physical pain, all experiences of negative emotions are down from their pandemic highs, but each is still much higher than a decade ago, showing how the world remains on an emotional edge.

• Worry dropped by one point in 2024, returning to its pre-pandemic level. Yet it remains five points higher than it was in 2014 and almost 10 points higher than it was in 2006.

• Physical pain rose two points, matching its previous high.

• Stress, sadness and anger showed no change from the previous year.

Implications for Peace

The global rise in unhappiness over the past decade has been well-documented, yet many leaders have overlooked it because they rely on economic indicators while ignoring daily emotional health.

This oversight matters because negative emotions do not just reflect distress; they narrow people’s focus and erode their coping capacity. When these feelings become chronic, they leave individuals and societies more vulnerable to instability.

As the world’s mood has soured, it has also become less stable, with rising political unrest, more conflicts and higher death tolls.

• The Global Peace Index, which tracks the absence of violence and conflict across 163 countries, shows riots, strikes and antigovernment demonstrations rose 244% from 2011 to 2019 — notably, even before the pandemic.

Global Trends: Daily Positive Emotions

In 2024, Gallup asked adults worldwide whether they had experienced five positive emotions during much of the previous day:

• 88% of adults worldwide said they were treated with respect the previous day — up three points from 2023 and among the highest levels Gallup has ever recorded.

• Smiling or laughing (73%) and enjoyment (73%) held steady at long-term averages.

• 72% said they felt well-rested, essentially unchanged over the past decade, while 52% said they learned or did something interesting the previous day, which is slightly lower than in 2023 but still above 2014 levels.

The Resiliency of Positive Experiences

Globally, daily positive experiences have proven more resilient than negative ones — and in some cases, have even strengthened since the pandemic.

Research shows why:

• Positive emotions broaden awareness and help people build lasting resources, such as coping strategies, relationships and resilience, which further feed into positive experiences.

• These deeper foundations make positive experiences harder to shake, even in crisis, while negative emotions react more sharply to instability.

Gender Gaps in Emotions Worldwide

Women and men alike are experiencing more negative emotions than in the past. But for nearly two decades, more women than men have reported experiencing daily anger, sadness, worry and stress, as well as more physical pain. The gender gap only widened during the pandemic, particularly for sadness, worry and pain.

Women have also been more likely to report having health problems that keep them from activities people their age normally do. However, in 2024, this gender gap was the smallest in five years: 24% of women and 22% of men reported life-limiting health problems.

Yet women remain at least as likely — if not slightly more likely — as men to rate their lives positively enough to be considered “thriving” on Gallup’s Life Evaluation Index.

• In 2024, 29% of women worldwide were thriving compared with 27% of men.

This resiliency underscores that higher daily distress does not necessarily translate into lower overall life evaluations.

Country-Level Data on Emotional Wellbeing

Just as emotions vary within populations, they also differ sharply across countries.

• On the negative side, reported daily experiences of anger and sadness in Chad were among the highest in the world.

• On the positive side, nearly nine in 10 people in Denmark said they were treated with respect the previous day, and large majorities reported laughter and enjoyment each day.

Fragile states show the most distress.

In 2024, several of the countries reporting the highest levels of negative emotions and experiences were fragile or conflict-affected states:

Physical Pain by Country

• Experiences of daily physical pain were the highest in the world in a similar group of countries, led by Sierra Leone and Chad, where more than two-thirds of the population reported being in physical pain a lot the previous day.

• Such high levels in these two countries could reflect the combined effects of conflict, widespread malnutrition and fragile health systems that limit access to care.

View Pain Data for All Countries

Sadness by Country

• Sadness was high in Chad, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, all of which are post-conflict or continue to experience instability.

• Notably, sadness in Chad reached a record high in 2024, underscoring the extent of emotional distress in one of the world’s most institutionally and socially fragile states.

View Sadness Data for All Countries

Understanding Worry in Areas of Crisis

Recent events highlight the vulnerability of negative emotions to sudden shocks. These cases illustrate how conflict and crisis amplify emotional burdens — weakening the foundations of peace and health.

• In Ukraine, worry rose from 31% in 2021 to 52% after Russia’s invasion in 2022 and has remained elevated since, including a new high of 57% in 2025.

• In Lebanon, worry jumped from 40% in 2018 to 65% in 2019 during the country’s economic collapse and has rarely fallen below 50% since. Amid its fragile economic recovery, worry was 57% in 2025.

Laughter, Enjoyment and Respect: Context Matters

Daily emotion reports reflect not only what people feel but also how their cultures shape expression.

• In some cultures, people are encouraged to show joy, making them more likely to say they laughed or smiled the previous day.

• In others, modesty or restraint are valued, so enjoyment may be underreported even when living standards are high.

The same applies to negative emotions: In some cultures, people downplay stress or worry to appear strong, while in others, they are more candid.

Countries such as Denmark, Paraguay and Indonesia often rank among the highest for positive daily experiences like laughter, enjoyment and feeling treated with respect.

Mexico, Panama and Guatemala also frequently appear near the top, showing that positive emotions are not limited to the world’s wealthiest or safest nations but also thrive where culture and social life play a strong role.

These patterns suggest that cross-country differences reflect not only material conditions but also cultural norms in how people experience and express their emotions.

Correlations Between the Global Peace Index and Emotions

• Negative emotions are associated with higher scores on the Global Peace Index, which means they are more common in countries that experience more violence and conflict.

• Sadness, worry and anger, in particular, are common in less peaceful countries. These associations remain significant even after controlling for GDP, which means wealth does not explain all of the relationship.

• Stress and physical pain also show connections at the raw correlation level, but these relationships disappear once GDP is taken into account.

Correlations Between the Positive Peace Index and Emotions

• Negative emotions are also associated with higher scores on the Positive Peace Index, which means they are more common in countries with weaker sustainable peace.

• Anger, sadness and physical pain, in particular, are strongly associated with weaker Positive Peace scores.

• After controlling for GDP, anger, sadness and physical pain are still strongly associated with weaker Positive Peace scores, while stress and worry are not.

Positive Emotions and Peace: Weaker and GDP-Dependent

Positive emotions are less common in societies that experience more violence and do not have sustainable peace, but their associations with peace are not as strong as negative emotions.

• With the Global Peace Index, experiencing enjoyment, feeling respected, well-rested, laughing and smiling and learning something interesting is less common in countries that score higher on the index (which means they are less peaceful). However, these relationships disappear after controlling for GDP.

• With the Positive Peace Index, experiencing enjoyment and feeling respected is less likely in countries that are less peaceful, yet they too lose significance once GDP is accounted for.

This is not the case for negative emotions, which remain strongly tied to fragile peace — suggesting that while peace reduces distress, it does not deliver a positive emotional dividend above and beyond GDP per capita.

Peace, health and wellbeing rise and fall together.

The new findings show that anger and sadness are strongly tied to weaker scores on both the Global Peace Index, which tracks the absence of violence and conflict, and the Positive Peace Index, which measures the institutions and structures that sustain long-term stability.

This means Gallup's emotion metrics likely reflect more than the immediate absence of conflict. They also mirror the deeper foundations of sustainable peace — the kind of peace that depends on justice, wellbeing and security in daily life.

These patterns matter for health, too. Gallup's tracking shows that negative daily emotions are negatively correlated with life expectancy at birth: Where peace is fragile, people experience more anger and sadness, and populations are likely to live shorter lives.

Peace and health goals are intertwined.

Gallup's findings reinforce why the UN's Sustainable Development Goal 3 (Good Health and Wellbeing) and Sustainable Development Goal 16 (Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions) cannot be separated.

When peace is absent, health systems and communities weaken, making daily life more difficult and less secure. When peace is present, health and emotional wellbeing have room to improve.

Gallup's research suggests that emotions may serve as vital signs of these larger systems — indicators leaders can use to understand risk and design policies that strengthen both peace and health.