Susan Charles loves figuring out what keeps people happy. Throughout her career studying emotional processes across the adult life span, the professor of psychological science at University of California, Irvine has returned to this research focus again and again. Most emotions are experienced in a social context, so “what keeps us happy is often what keeps us safe,” she says. “What keeps us enjoying the people … that add meaning to our lives.” And quantifying daily stressors is part of unlocking the key to that happiness.
Much of her data come from a treasure trove of information known as the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) series, a groundbreaking longitudinal study based at the University of Wisconsin–Madison that tracks participants’ health and well-being through daily diaries and surveys conducted over the phone. There have been three major waves of data collection every 10 years—in 1995, 2005, and 2015—with a special fourth survey in 2012 to capture the effects of the Great Recession, a collective stressor. The researchers are now also collecting special data tracking the effects of the pandemic.
For eight days in a row, participants at each wave of the midlife study spoke to a researcher over the phone about their day. Respondents shared whether or not they experienced any stressors, such as getting into an argument with a friend or having a problem at work—the kinds of stressors that aren’t life-threatening but can be disruptive. Charles dug into these surveys, wanting to learn from the answers how different people react to and handle stress. But she kept having to throw out a small portion of the data.
Throughout every wave of the MIDUS study, 10 percent of respondents answered “no” to every question researchers asked about whether they experienced stress in some form that day. In other words, for eight days straight, these participants did not experience one iota of everyday, normal life stress. At first these outliers were meaningless to Charles, because a person who didn’t perceive or experience stress couldn’t help her figure out how people manage under stress. But then she thought, Wait a minute, who are these people?
Mixed blessing
A life devoid of stress, and stressors, might sound idyllic, but don’t be fooled. There’s a reason Charles decided to call her 2021 study of these miraculously unbothered outliers “The Mixed Benefits of a Stressor-Free Life.”
Charles and her colleagues found that without stress, a person would report higher levels of happiness than the general population and lower levels of other chronic health issues, but they also displayed signs of cognitive decline, such as lowered attention and concentration, worse short- and long-term memory, worse problem-solving, and a lowered ability to focus or inhibit unwanted behavior.
The message of this type of work isn’t that we should all learn to cherish every stressor we encounter. Not all moments of stress response are created equal. When researchers talk about the ones that do benefit people, “we’re not talking about really negative things like trauma-type stressors, we’re talking about things that are very normative in people’s lives,” says Jeremy Jamieson, a stress researcher at the University of Rochester.
He wasn’t involved in Charles’s study, but he, like Charles, studies the benefits of certain types of stress, an experience that usually gets a bad rap across the board. “Doing a hard assignment or taking on a difficult task at work—these are things that we all do all the time, and they’re not necessarily negative, but oftentimes they’re presented as such,” says Jamieson.
As with pain, the general experience of stress is universal, but what sets off this system is highly subjective. Two people, both capable of experiencing stress, can face the same relative stressor, say performing in the school play, and each handle it differently. One person may clam up under the spotlight, and the other may feel totally at home on the stage.
Also like pain, not experiencing stress may help a person avoid one problem, but it can summon others. While people who don’t feel pain may avoid one of life’s more unpleasant sensations, they are also prone to injury, since pain triggers a reflex that keeps us safe—it’s what tells us to take our hand off a hot stove. Someone who doesn’t feel pain could end up burning off their skin.
For its part, the stress response allows us to experience the full spectrum of life and facilitates learning. The hippocampus—the part of the brain that helps promote learning through memory—loves novelty. Successfully overcoming a small daily life stressor presents novelty in droves, and the opportunity for growth. Without these non-life-threatening challenges, the brain starts to suffer. This is likely what’s behind the lower memory and problem-solving skills Charles noted in the unstressed participants of the MIDUS cohort.
“When people feel the first sense of being overwhelmed, the response is to disengage, to back off and go away, but you don’t need to do that all the time,” says Jamieson. “To actually learn to be resilient, and persevere through challenges or difficulties, that’s an important skill set. That’s not just something that we either do or don’t do, it’s something that we can learn how to do.”
Charles will never fully be able to answer the question of who these stress-free people are. The identities of the survey takers are closely guarded by Carol Ryff, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who runs the MIDUS study.
But Charles does know the general profile of a stress-free person: They tend to be older, unmarried men with lower levels of education than those who reported at least one daily stressor during the eight days of surveys. The unstressed also reported many fewer daily activities than the rest of the cohort, except for watching TV, which they did with higher frequency than those who reported experiencing daily stressors.
For Charles, the most interesting tidbit is that it would seem on the surface that having fewer social interactions lowers a person’s daily stress—but that likely isn’t the whole story. Of the daily activities the MIDUS data capture, the unstressed reported spending fewer hours than the stressed on only the activities that typically include interacting with other people—working, volunteering, and both providing and receiving emotional support.
But Charles notes the paradox here: Having more social support is also an effective buffer against stress. “We know that people are our source of stress often in life,” Charles says with a warm laugh, but adds: “They’re absolutely necessary for us; we’re social creatures.”
There seems to be a sweet spot, an ideal amount of social support that keeps us thriving cognitively before too much time with other people becomes its own source of stress. The role of social networks, like so many aspects of the stress experience, is something researchers are continually exploring.
The story will be featured in an upcoming special issue, The Science of Stress: Why Stress Happens and How to Relieve It. It’s available this August wherever books and magazines are sold.
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