These are the most stressful things that will happen to you in life, in one chart

A survey shows the events in life which people find the most stressful.

The below chart, put together by Statista, shows that the most stressful event in a person's life is a sad one, the death of a spouse.

Loss and grief figure prominently in the data, with divorce and marital separation ranking at second and third place respectively.

The study was carried out by the Free University of Berlin, and looks at social readjustment caused by events which in turn produce stress. The methodology was a survey and scoring system carried out by participants.

Participants responding to the 'Social readjustment reading scale' check the items they have experienced in the past, for example within the last year. The life-change values of the checked items are then summed up to yield a total score that indicates how much “stress” the individuals had.

Unfortunately, stress often makes many of these problems worse, and once accentuated it makes it much more difficult to feel less stressed about them.

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