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January 30, 2008 -- According to new research published in the current issue of the journal Social Science & Medicine, whether you're in Canada, Mexico or Malaysia, most of us bottom out in our mid-40s, describing ourselves as unhappy or even depressed.
But here's the good news: We bounce back and describe ourselves as happier in our 50s and 60s.
Crunching data collected from health and social well-being surveys completed since 1972 by two million people in 80 countries, economist Andrew Oswald of the University of Warwick in Britain found that happiness follows a U pattern regardless of geography.
"You get this U shape with more or less whatever measure you have: happiness or psychological health or lack of depression," Dr. Oswald says. "Mental distress reaches a maximum in middle age."
And this is independent of gender, economic status and other factors. "It's not caused by having children crying through the middle of the night, divorces occurring after 20 years of marriage or anything like that," he says. "It's way deeper than you might think."
(One mathematical analogy: Aging from 20 to 45 has an effect equal to one-third the effect of being unemployed, Dr. Oswald says.)
