Boston Among Most Stress-Free Cities: Rankings

Boston is pretty relaxed, 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.

Boston ranked as the 17th least stressed-out city. Of the 64,824 tweets analyzed, 9.25 percent were “stressed,” the researchers found.

Massachusetts, meanwhile, ranked as the eighth least stressed-out state in the country. The most trying time of day here is apparently afternoon, and the toughest day of the week is Sunday.

TensiStrength, a tool developed by an IT university professor in England, was used to conduct the tweet analysis. The tool aims to identify words related to stress and relaxation, as well as anger and other negative emotions, to predict how the 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 the classification of the words in the text. 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.

The most stressed-out tweeters in America 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.

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

St. Paul, Minnesota, is either a stress-free oasis or better at masking stress than the rest of us. Just 2.56 percent of tweets analyzed were “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.

Stress can be healthy, health experts say. It can help you build skills necessary to handle life-threatening situations, for example.

But according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, stress can be harmful if experienced for a prolonged period of time or if stress-levels are severe enough to make a person feel overwhelmed and out of control.

Patch national staffer Dan Hampton contributed to this report