Face it, these haven’t been the easiest of times. Last weekend’s Steelers-Bengals playoff game packed a season’s worth of angst and apprehension into one evening.

Sunday’s contest with the Denver Broncos has been preceded with a week’s worth of fretting over the health of Ben Roethlisberger, Antonio Brown and D’Angelo Williams.

Then there’s the constant worrying over just how to spend that $1.5 billion Powerball jackpot. Take a lump-sum payout? Help the relatives? Move to Bali?

Plus, the arrival of cold and snow has led to fretting over the health of car batteries and furnaces.

And it’s also the beginning of tax season with all the trepidation and misgivings that the arrival of W-2 forms can bring.

This time of year is making people wired, tired and stressed to the max.

Now a scientific analysis of stress over time offers proof that there’s more stress in people’s lives today than 25 years ago.

Stress increased 18 percent for women and 24 percent for men from 1983 to 2009, according to researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, who analyzed data from more than 6,300 people. It’s considered the first historical comparison of stress levels across the United States

“The data suggest there’s been an increase in stress over that time,” said psychologist and lead author Sheldon Cohen, director of the CMU Laboratory for the Study of Stress, Immunity and Disease.

Cohen’s collaborator, Denise Janicki-Deverts, a research psychologist, said, “We had data by three different surveys. The 1983 Harris Poll was conducted by random digit dialing. The other two were Internet surveys with slightly different modalities.”

“Dr. Cohen developed a 10-question Perceived Stress Survey which asked people how overwhelming and stress-filled their lives were in the past month,” she said.

In research done in 1983, 2006 and 2009, those with higher stress were women, people with lower incomes and those with less education.

“Generally speaking those findings are consistent with other data,” said Janicki-Deverts. “Women face more stressors and stressors of greater severity. And a lot of stress goes along with a lower socio-economic status.”

Findings also show that as people age, stress decreases.

“Thirty-year-olds have less stress than 20-year-olds, and 40-year-olds have less stress than 30-year-olds,” said Cohen, who has studied the relationship between stress and disease for 35 years.

Carl Baughman, executive director and counselor at Samaritan Counseling, 1201 N. Main St. Ext., who’s been in the field 33 years has noticed this increase himself.

“I think there has been a steady increase,” said Baughman. “It’s not as if I saw a spike in the past year. It’s increased at a steady rate.”

Cohen’s results show increases in stress in almost every demographic category from 1983 to 2009, ranging from 10 to 30 percent.

And that’s not a good thing, according to Karen Colbert, senior director of communications and marketing at the American Heart Association of the Greater Pittsburgh area.

“While there’s no direct link between stress and heart disease, however, stress, especially chronic stress, can negatively affect your health and cause issues relating to your heart,” said Colbert.

“When you are stressed, adrenaline is dumped into your blood stream and your heart starts beating faster,” she said. “With chronic stress, your body doesn’t get to rest.”

That’s because your body is shutting down many of its functions to deal with the stress-induced fight-or-flight syndrome, according to Cranberry Township psychologist Donna Korczyk.

Korczyk said, “Stress results from the body’s response to something that the brain perceives as dangerous.”

While different people have different triggers for their individual stress reaction, Korczyk said, the body’s reaction is the same in every case.

“Blood pressure goes up, the heart rate and breathing rate increases, the adrenal glands limit digestion and tissue growth and repair,” she said.

Korczyk said that’s for stress situations that last briefly. Chronic or continued stress is considered harmful.

Chronic stress can weaken the immune system and cause uncomfortable physical symptoms such as headaches and stomach problems.

Janicki-Deverts said, “There has been some data that suggest perceived stress is a mortality risk. And Dr. Cohen has done studies over the past 25 years showing people with greater stress have a greater liklihood of developing a cold.”

“Part of my job is helping people deal with stress, to learn how to relax and reduce some of their responses to stress,” said Korczyk.

And the heart association says while stress has not been shown to be a cause of high blood pressure, stress can lead to unhealthy lifestyle choices that are associated with high blood pressure.

Those choices include being overweight, eating too much salt, lack of physical activity and drinking too much alcohol.

Korczyk said people may be more stressed now because many of the past social safety nets are frayed or gone.

“People may be experiencing more stress because they have less connection to their parents or their community,” she said. “And there’s a lack of social support through their religion or faith.”

“Women didn’t have as many expectations. They weren’t expected to be both a breadwinner and a parent,” she said.

“Social media could be inflating our expectations,” Korczyk said, filling us with envy over the supposed possessions and accomplishments of our peers.

Baughman said stress effects can be more than physical.

“Stress can cause relationship problems. It can affect parenting and marriages. It can show up at work where people can get no sense of satisfaction in their jobs,” said Baughman.

Baughman said stress reduction is not just a purely physical proposition.

“We are a faith-based counseling center,” he said. “We encourage people to use their spiritual aspects. Whether it’s prayer or mediation or going to a church or looking at a landscape.”

“There’s more to life than what they are feeling at the moment. We need to realize we are all spiritual beings,” said Baughman.