<p class="ingestion featured-caption">Alaska's lowest ranking was for workplace environment.Ramunas Bruzas/Shutterstock</p><ul class="summary-list"><li>WalletHub released its ranking of the happiest states in the US.</li><li>The study compared the 50 states using categories like emotional and physical well-being.</li></ul><p>While it's hard to articulate exactly <a target="_blank" class href="https://www.businessinsider.com/happiness-worldwide-highest-since-pandemic-gallup-global-emotions-report-2024-7">what happiness means to everyone</a>, one of <a target="_blank" class href="https://wallethub.com/edu/happiest-states/6959">WalletHub's most recent studies</a> aimed to do just that: measure and compare the population's happiness across states.</p><p>The personal-finance outlet compared the 50 states using three categories: emotional and physical well-being, work environment, and community and environment. These categories were quantified using a total of 30 metrics, including life expectancy, share of adult depression, commute time, unemployment, and divorce rate.</p><p>To do so, they pulled data from the US Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Sharecare Community Well-Being Index, AmeriCorps, and more.</p><p>From WalletHub's final list, Business Insider pulled the 10 lowest-ranked states to identify the 10 unhappiest.</p><p>WalletHub analyst Chip Lupo told BI that the unhappiest states in the country are "mostly rural low-income states, several in the Deep South where there's not just in terms of happiness, but in other economic and socioeconomic areas where this part of the country, and these states particularly, rank pretty lowly."</p><p>From Alaska to Louisiana, here are the unhappiest states in the country.</p>