Here Are The Most Stressed-Out Cities On Twitter

NEW YORK, NY — Stress can be healthy or unhealthy. While it can help you build skills necessary to handle life-threatening situations, it can also leave you lying awake all night, fearing the day ahead. And stress can be harmful if experienced for a prolonged period of time, or if stress-levels become severe enough to make you feel overwhelmed and out of control.

But some places seem to be a lot more stressed than others. On Twitter at least.

That’s according to Babylon Health, a health care and tech company that analyzed data gathered from 5 million tweets in real-time over two consecutive weeks. Tweets were taken from every state and the 100 most populated cities and towns, as well as each New York borough.

The most stressed-out tweeters in America apparently reside in Hialeah, Florida, the analysis found, with more than 13 percent of the city’s 5,266 tweets classified as at least moderately stressed.

San Bernardino, California, was the second most-stressed city, followed by North Las Vegas, Nevada, and Mesa, Arizona.

If the rankings are to be believed, Californians might consider taking up meditation or yoga — six cities in the Golden State ranked in the top 10 of most stressed out. Here are the 10.

1. Hialeah, FL, 13.03 percent
2. San Bernardino, CA, 12.87 percent
3. North Las Vegas, NV, 12.76 percent
4. Mesa, AZ, 12.59 percent
5. Chula Vista, CA, 12.03 percent
6. Bakersfield, CA, 11.96 percent
7. Toledo, OH, 11.92 percent
8. Stockton, CA, 11.91 percent
9. Santa Ana, CA, 11.89 percent
10. Riverside, CA, 11.86 percent

Meanwhile, St. Paul, Minnesota, must be as close to a stress-free oasis as any. Either that or the city's tweeters are just better at masking their stress than the rest of the country.

Just 2.56 percent of tweets analyzed were classified as “moderately” stressed or worse, the analysis found. For context, that’s nearly 5 percentage points lower than the next least-stressed out city, Glendale, Arizona, which saw 7.37 percent of stressed-out tweets.

TensiStrength, a tool developed by an IT university professor in England, was used to conduct the analysis. The tool aims to identify words related to stress and relaxation — as well as anger and other negative emotions — to predict how a person is feeling. For example, people tweeting about being late or having car trouble would be identified as stressed.

The tool estimates stress levels based on how the words in the text are classifed. The scale is roughly as follows: -1 (no stress), -2 (low stress), -3 (moderate stress), -4 (high stress), -5 (extreme stress).

The final rankings were determined based on locations with the highest share of tweets that were classified as “moderately stressed” or higher.