Overall, how anxious did you feel yesterday? Take a moment to think about how you would respond on a scale from 0 (‘not at all’) to 10 (‘completely’).
If this question seems familiar, it might be because it’s one of the central questions used by the Office of National Statistics to measure ‘personal wellbeing’. In April this year, for example, the average response was 3.9 out of 10, and a third of people responded with a score of 6 or higher – which is classed as having high levels of anxiety.
There are some situations, such as taking a test or responding to a threat, when heightened levels of anxiety can be a good thing. But when anxiety becomes more persistent and chronic, it can impair our decision-making, affect our relationships, and even our physical health. So it is worth asking: what influences people’s level of anxiety?
Researchers investigating this question have often looked at people’s early life experience for answers. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, they have repeatedly found that adverse childhood experiences – suffering physical or psychological abuse from a parent, for example – are associated with anxiety in adulthood.
But fewer researchers have looked at the impact of positive childhood experiences upon wellbeing, including levels of anxiety. This is now starting to change, and together with Gordon Brown and Nobuyuki Haneki, I set about contributing to this growing body of research through a set of global studies that sought to explore the relationship between positive childhood experiences and multiple measures of personal wellbeing.
We made use of a framework developed by the psychologist Darcia Narvaez called the ‘evolved nest’, which identifies nine positive childhood experiences (such as responsive care from caregivers and free play with other children). And then ran studies with 1,500 people aged 18-34 from the UK, the US and Japan. We used a set of questions that enabled us to give everyone a 1-5 ‘nestedness’ score, and also measured participants’ levels of anxiety using the same ONS question mentioned above.
The results are striking, and similar across all three countries. Positive childhood experiences have a strong impact upon anxiety levels later in life. Overall, for every 1-point increase in nestedness, anxiety decreased by 1.2 points on the 10-point scale.
In other words, if you score highly on the ‘nestedness’ scale, you will likely report having low levels of anxiety. Whereas if you have a low ‘nestedness’ score, you will likely experience high levels of anxiety.
To put these figures into perspective, we looked at how much your household income would need to rise to change how anxious you reported feeling. To see the same reduction in anxiety as a 1-point increase in evolved nest experience in the UK required a £129,000 increase in annual household income.
We are still in the early stages of this research programme. But we think that some of these findings already point to the importance of focusing on early years factors when thinking about what might affect our wellbeing later in life.
