Some people don’t experience stress. Are they happier?

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.