Ranked: The Most Stressed Cities in America

Stress. It affects all of us—or almost all of us. In a 2017 Gallup poll, about 80% of Americans said they frequently or sometimes encounter stress in their daily lives, while 17% said they rarely feel stressed. But 4% said they never feel stressed. Never? They clearly don't live in cities.

City life is an endless series of stresses. Your day starts off badly because you had too many drinks and not enough sleep last night. You endure an hour or more in traffic to get to a job which is boring yet pressurized and which leaves you feeling both under-appreciated and in over your head. You're definitely underpaid.

You hardly even notice the endless micro-stresses you encounter on your lunch break—crowds, pollution, rude service and fast food that's neither fast nor, technically, food. You've got bigger worries—like how you're going to pay the rent this month and whether you'll ever be able to save up enough money to buy an apartment at these prices.

By the time you leave the office it's dark, and cities at night give your brain a whole range of things it doesn't want to think about. So you go out. And you have too many drinks...

But maybe city life doesn't have to be like this. Maybe you could find somewhere that offers a balance, giving all the opportunities of a big city with fewer of the stresses. Personal finance site WalletHub may have the answer.

They looked at 182 cities across the U.S—including the 150 most populated and at least two of the biggest in each state—and ranked them according to four key factors: work stress, financial stress, family stress and health & safety stress. The ranking system used means 1 is best and 182 is worst.

In this slideshow we look at the most stressed cities—where even getting to work is hard work. Another slideshow explores the least stressed cities—where you can get out of the rat race but stay in the fast lane.