Economy Anxiety Is Compounding

Executive summary

American consumers are running out of patience with rising prices — and the pump is where it shows most. A new Economy Vibe Check survey of 837 respondents finds that 80% report gas prices climbed in the last month, a figure that tracks closely with the University of Michigan's Consumer Sentiment Index hitting an all-time low of 44.8 in May 2025.

The results paint a portrait of compounding financial stress: utilities, groceries, and gasoline are all squeezing budgets simultaneously, and open-ended responses overflow with words like "inflation," "unaffordable," and "survival." These aren't outlier complaints — Northwestern Mutual's 2025 national study independently confirms 65% of U.S. adults name inflation as their top financial worry.

Four takeaways define the story: First, gas prices function as a real-time economic barometer — respondents who felt the pump squeeze were more likely to say the economy feels worse than a week ago. Second, utilities edged out groceries and gas as the most-cited structural concern, a counterintuitive result suggesting energy bills have become the new front line. Third, personality shapes perception: respondents higher in neuroticism reported a measurably darker economic outlook, independent of actual conditions. Fourth, financial anxiety isn't episodic — for a meaningful share of respondents, it's a constant backdrop.

Context

The Economy Vibe Check was fielded to 837 U.S. respondents across seven questions probing how people feel about the economy right now — not in the abstract, but through the concrete lenses of gas prices, utility bills, grocery costs, and the anxiety those pressures create week to week. The study combines structured multiple-choice items with open-ended prompts, capturing both what people choose from a list and what they reach for when given a blank page.

The timing matters. The survey lands in the middle of a sustained consumer confidence collapse. The University of Michigan's preliminary May 2025 results show sentiment down nearly 30% since January, with only 17% of consumers expecting to maintain spending on high-priced items — a far weaker posture than during the 2022 post-pandemic inflation surge. Five-year inflation expectations have climbed to 3.9%, and 57% of consumers spontaneously mentioned high prices as eroding their personal finances in that same wave.

The study's design captures a particular kind of signal: how people feel about economic conditions relative to a week ago, which factors they identify as driving that anxiety, and how personality traits — specifically neuroticism and openness to experience from the OCEAN model — interact with those perceptions. That last element is unusual. Most consumer sentiment surveys treat respondents as interchangeable; this one uses psychographic profiling to ask whether the same objective conditions land differently depending on who is perceiving them. The answer, it turns out, is yes — and the gap is measurable.

The population skews toward the economically engaged: respondents are completing a multi-question survey about their finances and the news cycle, which likely screens in people for whom these topics are salient. That self-selection makes the results directionally consistent with nationally representative benchmarks, not a distortion of them.

Findings

80% Hit at the Pump — and It's Reshaping How They See Everything Else

The most unambiguous number in this study: 80.1% of respondents say gas prices have risen in the last month. Only 5.5% say prices have held steady. That 15-to-1 ratio isn't just a data point about fuel costs — it's a window into how the current inflation episode feels on the ground.

Gas prices carry outsized psychological weight. Research from Stanford economists Binder and Makridis shows that consumer sentiment becomes measurably more pessimistic as gas prices rise, describing the pump as "an additional amplification mechanism" for broader economic distress. The pattern holds here: respondents who confirmed gas price increases were more likely to report feeling worse about the economy than they did a week prior. Gas doesn't just cost more — it signals that things are getting worse.

Only 10.3% of respondents sidestep this dynamic entirely by not driving a gas-powered vehicle. Notably, that group skews higher on the Prism Resilience personality trait (r = 0.228), suggesting that opting out of gas dependency may reflect not just circumstance but a pattern of proactive financial adaptation.

Utilities Topped the Worry List — and That's the Surprising Part

Ask people to check every factor driving their economic anxiety from a list, and the results reveal something unexpected: utilities came in first, selected by 8.5% of responses, edging out groceries (7.4%), gasoline (6.5%), and inflation (5.9%).

This ranking challenges the assumption that gas prices dominate every dimension of consumer concern. In open-ended responses, gasoline gets mentioned more viscerally — it's the price people see posted on a sign twice a day. But when forced to structure their concerns, respondents pointed to their electric and heating bills as the heaviest weight. That aligns with Consumer Reports data showing 68% of U.S. adults say energy bills are already straining their finances, and that utilities requested a record $31 billion in rate increases in 2025 — double 2024's level.

The broader takeaway is that cost-of-living anxiety isn't single-issue. Respondents are being squeezed across utilities, food, and fuel simultaneously. That compounding effect is what separates this moment from a typical price spike in one category.

Who Feels It Worst: Personality Predicts Economic Gloom

One of the study's most striking findings has nothing to do with prices — it's about the person doing the perceiving. Respondents who scored higher on the OCEAN Neuroticism trait reported a meaningfully worse week-over-week economic outlook, with a Spearman correlation of r = −0.374. In plain terms: the more neurotic the respondent, the darker their read on the economy right now.

This isn't a marginal effect. A correlation of that magnitude on a personality-to-perception measure is consistent with established academic research showing that neuroticism systematically biases economic assessment toward pessimism — including overestimating unemployment rates. For policymakers and communicators, this means a portion of measured economic pessimism reflects dispositional anxiety, not objective conditions. That doesn't make the pessimism less real for the people experiencing it, but it does mean that messaging purely focused on data points may not move the needle for this segment.

On the other end of the trait spectrum, respondents higher in Openness to Experience were more likely to report noticing gas price increases (r = 0.266, p = 0.002). High-openness individuals tend to be more intellectually curious and attentive to environmental cues — which may make them early detectors of inflationary signals and, by extension, influential voices in peer networks when prices shift.

The Anxiety Never Really Turns Off

Financial anxiety in this sample is not a spike triggered by a single bad headline. When asked how often they feel anxious about financial news, 10.3% of respondents said it strongly affects them and 8.5% said it somewhat affects them — together accounting for nearly one in five respondents at the high end of the anxiety scale. Responses to "what worries you most" ranged from clipped frustration ("just about everything") to exhausted realism ("more and more people on the streets... the grocery bill keeps going up and the rent... it's hard out here").

External research links heavy social media use to elevated financial anxiety, suggesting the news environment itself may be amplifying stress beyond what price data alone would predict. The implication: economic sentiment in this population is being shaped not just by what things cost, but by a persistent state of financial vigilance — one that doesn't switch off between news cycles.

Conclusion

The Economy Vibe Check captures a consumer population that is not just worried — it's exhausted. Gas prices hit eight in ten respondents in a single month. Utilities are quietly becoming a larger structural burden than gasoline. And the open-ended responses make clear that people aren't looking for analysis; they're looking for relief.

Three things are worth watching closely. First, the utilities front: rate increase requests are at record levels, and if regulators approve even a fraction of the $31 billion pipeline, the top-ranked concern in this study will get worse before it gets better. Second, the neuroticism signal has practical implications for anyone trying to communicate economic conditions — whether that's a central bank, a financial brand, or a policy office. A meaningful share of pessimism is dispositional, and data-heavy reassurances won't move it. Third, the high-openness respondents who notice gas price changes first are worth tracking as leading indicators: if they start reporting relief at the pump, broader sentiment could follow.

The national benchmarks and this study point in the same direction. Consumer confidence is fragile, the cost pressures are multi-front, and the feedback loop between rising prices and emotional economic perception is running hot.