Gallup® – World Emotional Health Report 2025 – Part 1 - Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post #1178

Gallup® – World Emotional Health Report 2025 – Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post #1178

Dear Colleagues! This is Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post #1178 for Pharma Veterans. Pharma    Veterans Blogs are published by Asrar Qureshi on its dedicated site https://pharmaveterans.com. Please email to pharmaveterans2017@gmail.com  for publishing your contributions here.

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Preamble

Gallup® State of the World’s Emotional Health 2025. [Quote] In a world increasingly marked by political, social and emotional fragmentation, the responsibility to safeguard health has never been more urgent. At the World Health Summit, our leitmotif for 2025 is clear: Taking Responsibility for Health in a Fragmenting World. This principle recognizes that health is not only about medicine or policy; it is also about the emotional fabric that holds societies together. 

This first State of the World’s Emotional Health report makes a powerful contribution to that mission. Gallup’s findings reveal that the world is on an emotional edge: worry, stress, sadness and anger affect hundreds of millions of people daily, with levels higher than a decade ago. These emotions are not fleeting states of mind. They shape physical health, determine resilience and — when prolonged — undermine mental health, societal stability and peace. Where peace is fragile, negative emotions intensify. Where peace is strong, populations live longer, healthier lives.

This 2-part blog post is based on the insights from the above report; Pakistan perspective has been added. Link to report at the end.

Mapping the World’s Emotional Health – A Vital Signs Check

Beyond GDP – Why Emotional Health Matters

When we talk about global wellbeing, metrics like income, life-expectancy or education often dominate. But emotional health, how people feel day to day, is increasingly recognized as a vital indicator of individual and societal resilience, stability and productivity. The Gallup report draws on more than 145,000 interviews across 144 countries in 2024 to provide an emotional-vital-signs check of the world.

The findings are sobering: many more people experience negative emotions than a decade ago, even as key positive experiences remain surprisingly steady. And crucially, negative emotions correlate strongly with weaker peace, weaker institutions and worse public health. Understanding these patterns is critical for leaders, because emotional distress is not just a personal matter; it signals vulnerability in societies and systems.

Negative Emotions Remain Elevated

In 2024:

39% of adults worldwide reported worry for much of the previous day.

 37% reported stress.

32% reported physical pain, 26% sadness, 22% anger.

Although some of these metrics have dipped slightly from pandemic highs, each remains significantly higher than a decade ago. For example, worry is ~5 percentage-points above 2014, and nearly 10 points above 2006.

Why does this matter? Because chronic worry, stress, pain and sadness are not only signals of immediate distress—they erode adaptive capacity, narrow attention, weaken coping, and over time contribute to poorer physical health, shorter life-expectancy and institutional fragility. The report emphasizes these as early warning signals. ([Gallup.com][2])

Positive Emotions Are Still Resilient

On the flip side, the report finds many positive emotional markers remain stable and high:

88% of adults globally said they were treated with respect the previous day; one of the highest levels Gallup has ever recorded.

73% said they had laughed or smiled a lot the previous day; 73% said they had enjoyed the previous day; 72% said they felt well-rested.

52% said they had learned something interesting the previous day, slightly lower than in 2023 but still above 2014 levels.

This dual pattern, high negative experiences + resilient positive experiences, tells us something important: many people live in environments of high stress but still manage to find meaning, respect, laughter and engagement. Positive emotions appear more deeply rooted, while negative emotions are more sensitive to environmental shocks and systemic stress.

The Emotion-Peace-Health Nexus

One of the major contributions of the Gallup report is showing how emotional health links to peace and broader societal health. By pairing the emotional-experience data with the Institute for Economics & Peace (IEP) Global Peace Index and Positive Peace Index, the report establishes strong associations:

In countries with weaker Global Peace Index scores (more conflict/violence), negative emotions such as sadness, worry and anger were distinctly more common.

In countries with weaker Positive Peace Index scores (weaker institutions, less social cohesion, more inequality), negative emotions (particularly anger, sadness, pain) were strongly elevated even after controlling for GDP.

Conversely, while positive emotions were somewhat lower in less peaceful countries, the association with peace was less strong, suggesting that negative emotions may act as earlier or sharper indicators of fragility.

This matters because it means emotional-health data can serve as early-warning signals of societal stress: when worry, sadness and anger rise, underlying systems, healthcare, governance, social cohesion, may be under strain. These are not just personal emotional responses; they accumulate and feed into risk of instability, poorer health outcomes and weaker institutions.

Demographic Breakdowns: Age, Gender, Life-stage

The report also explores how emotional experiences differ by gender and age.

Gender:

Women globally report higher rates of worry, sadness and physical pain than men. For example, up-to-date data show women are more likely to say they experienced sadness, worry and physical pain on a given day.

However, despite this higher day-to-day distress, women still report slightly higher life-evaluation ratings (“thriving”) than men in many places; 29% of women vs. 27% of men in 2024 said they were thriving.

 Age:

Younger adults (aged 15–49) are more likely to report anger, especially lingering above 2014 levels.

Midlife adults (age ~30–49) report the highest stress and the least well-rested status.

Older adults (50+) report more sadness and worry, though trends show some improvement in certain contexts.

These patterns emphasize that emotional-health risk is not uniform: women and younger/midlife adults face particular burdens and deserve targeted attention.

Country and Regional Insights: Fragility, Prosperity and Emotional Health

The emotional health map of the world reveals wide variation.

Countries like Chad, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea reported extremely high levels of negative emotions, anger, sadness, physical pain, often tied to conflict, poverty and weak institutions.

In contrast, countries like Denmark and Vietnam reported very low levels of anger (~5%) and high levels of positive experiences.

The correlation with peace is strong: the least peaceful countries consistently feature among those with the highest negative-emotion experiences.

What is significant here is that emotional health does not map simply to GDP. While being rich helps, it does not immunize a society against daily worry, stress or sadness. Social cohesion, governance, institutional quality, equality and peace matter very much.

Trends & Trajectories: What the Data Show Over Time

The report traces emotional health trends over time, and some key findings emerge.

Negative experiences spiked during the COVID-19 pandemic but have only partially subsided. Worry, stress, anger remain significantly higher than pre-pandemic.

Positive experiences have been more stable, suggesting resilience in core human emotional systems even in shock-prone times.

The gender gap in daily distress widened during the pandemic (for sadness, worry and pain) though in 2024 it was the smallest in five years in some measures.

These trajectories suggest that emotional health is a structural challenge: not just caused by COVID, but accentuated by underlying shifts, economic volatility, social disruption, climate and conflict stressors, changing labor-markets, digital overload.

Sum Up Part 1

The world is emotionally more taxed than a decade ago. Worry and stress are elevated; yet many people continue to report positive experiences of respect, laughter, enjoyment. Emotional health reveals deeper dynamics: societies under stress, frayed institutions and inequality show up in daily emotion data. For leaders in government, business and civil society, emotions are not just a “nice to measure” but a critical part of the risk-dashboard.

Concluded.

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For most blogs, I research from several sources which are open to public. Their links are mentioned under references. There is no intent to infringe upon anyone’s copyrights. If, any claim is lodged, it will be acknowledged and duly recognized immediately.

Reference:

https://www.gallup.com/analytics/349280/state-of-worlds-emotional-health.aspx?utm_source=public_sector&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=global_emotions_report_october_1_10132025&utm_term=information&utm_content=read_the_report_cta_1