Canadians are Feeling More Relaxed
Jul 28, 2011
There has been considerable discussion and concern over the last while about the aging of the Canadian population and what this will mean to our social programs.
We’ve heard repeatedly that an increasingly older demographic threatens to put unprecedented pressure on our health care and pension systems. The increasing tide of baby boomers is supposed to overwhelm existing social programs and take crucial funding away from education and child care.
But there is a bit of good news in this, at least according to Statistics Canada. In a recently-released study of how Canadians spend their spare time, it found that, whatever our demographic destiny, we seem to be more calm and stress-free as a nation now more than ever.
Part of Statscan’s General Social Survey, the report compared findings from 2010 with ones from a similar study in 1998. And the results suggest a rather dramatic decline in the amount of tension in our lives.
The proportion of Canadians who reported feeling “trapped” by their daily routine dropped from 39 percent to 34 percent between 1998 and 2010. And the time set aside for fun also increased, with the percentage of Canadians who said they had no time for fun falling from 38 percent to 29 percent.
In fact, every single indicator measuring the amount of stress in Canadians’ lives seems to have improved over the past 12 years. Canadians are spending more time with family; fewer describe themselves as workaholics; fewer report feeling under constant stress.
So what’s behind this trend? According to Statscan, our trend towards peacefulness can be attributed to the very aging of our society that we’ve been concerned about: “These declines may be due to the fact that the 55-plus age group has become a larger part of the Canadian population over the years and in general people of this age tend to feel less stressed by time pressures than their younger counterparts.”
The study notes that the most highly stressful years of adulthood are those between the ages of 35 and 44. Canadians aged 55 to 64 are far less likely to report leading a stressed life, largely because they have less of the problems that tend to afflict the younger age group – things like establishing a career, getting a mortgage, and having children.
So it appears that Canadians are finding some sense of work-life balance that perhaps was not present before. Hopefully the trend will continue.
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