Is Buying a House One of Life's Most Stressful Events?

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Anyone who has purchased a house, especially one which required you to move from your former residence, knows that few things feel more stressful. But surprisingly, moving house doesn’t fall on the list of life’s forty most stressful events, at least according to the Social Readjustment Rating Scale, a sociological tool developed in the 1960s to measure the stress caused by different life events. On that scale, places one, two, and three went to the death of a loved one, divorce, and marital separation. Though having a large mortgage did come in at number 20, a change in living conditions at 28, and having a small mortgage placed as the 37th most stressful life event.

What’s the Big Idea?

When it comes to our health, daily hassles and their subsequent stresses burden us more than catastrophic events because of their ability to wear us down over time. And on the list of daily American hassles, solving problems related to “property, investment, and taxes” comes in at number eight. The distinction between daily hassles and major life events is interesting to social scientists because of how we relate to them later in life. The daily hassles remain ever-present while our memories of life events change over time, often shifting to exclude those which we felt intensely but for a short period of time–such as moving house.