Cost of living adds to pandemic stress in UK

Newly published data from the Office for National Statistics, or ONS, shows that happiness levels in the United Kingdom have not returned to their pre-pandemic levels, with the cost of living crisis contributing to raised levels of stress and anxiety, and with young people being among those who are worst affected.

On average, in 2019 before the COVID-19 pandemic, 30 percent of people described their life satisfaction as very high, but in the last quarter of 2022, that figure stood at just 23 percent.

The contrast was even more marked among people under the age of 20, with just 19 percent recording very high, as opposed 32 percent of those in the age group 60 or over.

The Financial Times newspaper quoted Andy Bell, CEO of charity the Centre for Mental Health, as saying that the continued strained economic climate was definitely taking its toll on the nation's mental health.

"As more people struggle financially, the risks to our mental health grow and more people find themselves experiencing low wellbeing," he said.

Since the pandemic began to ease, Britain has been beset by financial problems. Food inflation is at its highest for 45 years, overall inflation reached 10.1 percent in March, and continually increasing interest rates have seen mortgage payments at their highest since the financial crisis of 2008.

In addition, having been stretched to its limits during the pandemic, other ongoing issues such as budgeting and staffing have seen the National Health Service struggle to keep up with users' demands, with the average wait time for accessing NHS mental health services now being up to nine months.

The findings are in contrast to a wider global study involving participants from 137 countries published in March this year, the 10th World Happiness Report, which showed that the pandemic had caused a rebalancing that, overall, had not impacted negatively on happiness.

The Guardian newspaper reported that when people were asked to rate their lives on a scale of one to 10, average scores for the years 2020-2022 were the same as the pre-pandemic years 2017-2019.

The report noted that "the undoubted pains (of the pandemic) were off set by increases in the extent to which respondents had been able to discover and share the capacity to care for each other in difficult times."

However, significantly in light of the more recent ONS figures, in a poll within the report measuring the happiness of people from 20 countries, the UK came 19th.

Anxiety caused by worries about finance can be manifested physically, with people losing sleep and cutting back on socializing to try and save money, leading to what Alexa Knight, director of England at the Mental Health Foundation, has called a "mental health emergency".