Harvard scientists tracked 200,000 people to see how one common form of distress alters the future

New research spanning 23 countries shows that everyday suffering takes a lingering toll on human flourishing. Scientists found that adults experiencing distress reported lower life satisfaction, poorer health, and more loneliness up to a year later.

A new study published in Communications Medicine suggests that experiencing suffering can predict worse well-being across multiple areas of life roughly a year later. These findings provide evidence that addressing everyday emotional and physical distress is an important step toward improving overall human flourishing on a global scale. Human life involves a wide range of difficulties, inconveniences, and adversities.

Sometimes, these challenging events lead to a state of suffering. Suffering is generally defined as a deeply distressing personal experience that lasts a considerable amount of time and involves the loss of something a person perceives as good. While suffering often overlaps with physical pain or depression, scientists note that it is a distinct experience with its own unique characteristics.

For example, a person might endure the intense physical pain of athletic training because they desire the health outcome, meaning they are in pain but they are not suffering. On the other hand, someone might suffer deeply because a minor injury prevents them from pursuing a highly prized life goal. Suffering also differs from clinical depression.

A person can experience a prolonged low mood without feeling a strong, persistent desire for their current situation to stop, which is a defining feature of suffering. Because suffering is a diffuse experience that can permeate all aspects of a person’s life, it has the potential to impact many different dimensions of well-being. Researchers increasingly view well-being through the broad lens of human flourishing.

Human flourishing is a holistic concept that looks at how well a person is doing across all areas of human existence. This includes their physical health, mental health, social relationships, financial stability, and personal character. Most past research on suffering has focused on very specific segments of the population, such as older adults, hospitalized individuals, or patients receiving palliative care for terminal illnesses.

Richard G. Cowden, a research scientist at the Human Flourishing Program and the Department of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, wanted to broaden this focus. “Suffering is common , and it is not limited to people facing severe illness or crisis,” Cowden said. Cowden noted that earlier data highlighted how widespread the issue truly is.

“In prior work using Wave 1 of the Global Flourishing Study, approximately 44% of adults across 22 countries reported ‘some’ or ‘a lot’ of suffering, suggesting that a nontrivial number of people in the general population experience suffering,” Cowden explained. To build a better understanding of how suffering operates in the general population, scientists needed to look at everyday distress in a wide variety of cultures. “In this study, we used two waves of longitudinal data from the Global Flourishing Study to address a major gap,” Cowden said.

“No prior work had tested whether suffering predicts subsequent well-being across a wide range of outcomes, including happiness, physical health, relationships, character, and financial security, in nationally representative samples across many countries.” To explore these ideas, the researchers analyzed data from the Global Flourishing Study . This massive scientific project includes nationally representative survey data from 207,919 adults living in 23 different countries and territories.

The countries were specifically chosen to represent diverse geographic, cultural, and religious backgrounds. In total, the sampled countries cover roughly two thirds of the global human population. The