Alongside the big, heavy dents in America’s overall wellbeing during the Great Recession were a number of scattershot effects. While many of these have quietly subsided, some still linger, and others may last for generations to come.

Vasectomy rates are the latest piece of personal health data to emerge from analyses of the Great Recession. According to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM), between 150,000 and 180,000 additional men were estimated to have gotten a vasectomy each year between 2007 and 2009. Experts see the increase as another indication of how much the economy can impact how people practice their personal health.

“Whether it’s successful hunting or having a good job, economics has played a role in having children throughout human history,” said Dr. Rebecca Z. Sokol, president of the ASRM, in a statement.

From the data, ASRM researchers speculate the jump from 3.9 percent of men having a vasectomy before the recession to 4.4 percent afterward is explained by other coexisting factors. For example, phone surveys of more than 10,000 respondents revealed that men were more likely to be without health insurance after the recession and have a lower income. It wasn’t necessarily the case that men wanted fewer kids — there was no change in how many men expressed interest in having kids — but that they simply knew they couldn’t afford to have any.

This constraint is surprisingly common across other demographics and personal health choices. Millennials, for instance, were found in one study to have cultivated a sense of empathy as a result of the Great Recession, due primarily to their personal battle with economic hardship. They may also have become more socially and environmentally conscious.

In the mental health arena, wellbeing was predictably poorer. Suicide rates rose by 4.8 percent between 2007 and 2010 in the U.S. and 4.5 percent in Canada. As a result of the economic crisis in Europe, rates rose by 6.5 percent by 2009 across the pond and stayed at the higher level through 2011. People were also searching Google for remedies to their stress-related illnesses more often.

But the effects aren’t just immediate. Sometimes sustained poverty can result in decades-long and cross-generational effects. Consider the research that found a person’s risk for cognitive decline in old age increased as a result of Great Recession. When faced with stressful financial woes, people in middle age were found to quickly deplete their “cognitive reserves” — shorthand for the extra firepower people may carry into old age. Tests showed people who aged into retirement having endured more recessions had emptier cognitive reserves than people having endured fewer.

Similarly, the very experience of poverty can affect our genes. Geneticists already knew that maltreated kids grow up to be more sensitive to stress as adults, but it wasn’t clearly understood, or maybe even hypothesized, that this effect cut directly to a genetic level. A study in July found this early-life stress carried the same methylation — a biomarker scientists routinely use for indications of stress or trauma — that rats exhibited when they were deprived of nuzzling and licking from their mothers.

“The new studies suggest a vicious multigenerational circle that affects a horrifyingly large number of children, making them more vulnerable to stress when they grow up and become parents themselves,” wrote Alison Gopnik, University of California at Berkeley psychology professor, in The Wall Street Journal.

Together, these effects suggest recessions can exact a crippling amount of force on people. They don’t just rob us of our financial security; they drain our senses of emotional, mental, and physical wellbeing, too. And they do so at all turns of life, from predicting cognitive decline as we age, all the way back to limiting our likelihoods of having kids in the first place.