When you think of all the experiences and events that cause you the most stress, it’s likely that daily miseries rise to the top of the list. After all, significant life events can stretch you to your limits, but, with luck, those are few and far between. Even so, a significant life event carries its own set of what stress researchers call “hassles.” Accidents in which you’re injured create stress, not only for the physical consequences, but all the legal, medical, and other entanglements involved. Much of this has been highlighted in recent natural disasters, including the January 2025 California wildfires and the September 2024 North Carolina floods, to think of two examples. In the North Carolina case, people are still dealing with what is described as a “slow-moving crisis.”
On the flip side, think of all the times your mood received a major boost. How many of these experiences would qualify as “major”? All it might take is a smiley face in a text from a friend to make you feel happy and valued as a person. In the stress literature, these little pop-ups of joy can be just as—or more—important to your mental health than the “big” events in people’s romantic, family, or work lives.
Why Personality Makes a Difference
All of this probably makes sense to you, especially if you reflect on the balance between hassles and uplifts you can catalog from the last few days. However, according to Pennsylvania State University’s Natasha DeMeo and colleagues in a 2023 paper, “Introversion is associated with maladaptive responses to stressful, negative stimuli.” When exposed to a daily hassle, it would follow that introverts would take things much harder than those who have a more outward-focused approach to life.
In reviewing the previous literature, the Penn State authors note the health-related consequences of exposure to hassles and uplifts. People who experience both high intensity and frequency of hassles suffer more health consequences, including higher rates of mortality. Conversely, people who report that their life has more uplifting daily events are both happier and healthier.
You might argue that, sure, if you’re a “happy” person, you’ll see the world through the kind of rose-colored glasses that would turn a hassle into an uplift (i.e., seeing a silver lining). If you aren’t blessed with this sunny disposition, even an uplift will seem like a burden (now you have to reply to that text with the smiley face). However, DeMeo et al. believe that it’s not just optimism, but introversion-extraversion that can influence your reactions to daily events. Previous research shows that introverts are more thrown off by hassles and also less boosted by uplifts. This research, though suggestive, fails to meet what the Penn State research team regards as sufficient grounds for validity because much of it was based on laboratory studies or flawed measures of hassles and uplifts. To overcome these limitations, the authors used what’s called ecological momentary assessment (EMA). Let’s see, they argue, what happens when we ask people to report in real time about their frequency and intensity of hassles and uplifts.
Testing the Daily Variations in Stress
With a comprehensive data set at their disposal from an age- and racially/ethnically diverse sample (242 participants, average age 46 years), DeMeo et al. analyzed two weeks of five-times-daily ratings of hassles and uplifts. Participants also reported on demographic characteristics and completed a standard introversion-extraversion scale.
You can try answering the questions posed to participants about hassles and uplifts on that five-times-a-day basis with these prompts:
- Hassles: Had anything occurred since the last assessment including any event, even a minor one, which negatively affected you?
- Uplifts: Had anything occurred since the last assessment including any event, even a minor one, which affected you in a positive way?
Both of these, if answered affirmatively, were followed by intensity ratings of 0 to 100. The hassles were categorized into such groupings as interpersonal conflict, health-related, traffic, and financial problems.
Importantly, in analyzing the significance of introversion as a predictor of responses to daily hassles and uplifts, the authors controlled for potential contributors including age and gender as well as neuroticism and recent symptoms of depression and anxiety.
Overall, reports of hassles among the study sample showed that hassles were relatively frequent (41 percent) with only 7 percent reporting no hassles at all. Apparently, hassles are a fact of daily life. In contrast, uplift reporting amounted to nearly half of all assessments, with 6 percent reporting none (some of whom also reported no hassles). Uplifts, then, are also a frequent occurrence.
For those high in introversion, though, the story was quite a bit different, at least for uplifts. There was no relationship between hassle frequency and intensity and introversion. For uplifts, people high in introversion reported fewer of these per day than those with average introversion scores (15.4 vs. 18.6). They also rated the uplifts as less uplifting (76.2 vs. 79.1) than those with average levels of introversion.
The authors note that it’s difficult to interpret the “null” (i.e., no) finding regarding hassles, though they observe that there were some associations between introversion and specific categories of hassles (perhaps health, though this requires further study). For uplifts, DeMeo et al. suggest that introverts may experience fewer of these on a daily basis because, unlike extraverts, they do not “seek and attract social interactions and other positive experiences.” You have to put yourself out there, in other words, to have the good vibes from other people come back and cheer you up.
Finding Uplifts in All the Right Places
Considerable research has shown that people high in introversion derive pleasure from the opportunity for quiet reflection and time to themselves. However, in a world in which hassles and uplifts are seemingly unavoidable, this tendency to be alone could come at a cost. The Penn State findings don’t suggest that introverts suddenly change overnight into extraverts to gain the stress resilience advantage. However, recognizing that social support can make life easier would seem to be an important step toward finding life’s little pleasures.
To sum up, recognizing that big events come with a potential daily experience price tag can be a first step toward managing to navigate those smaller emotional costs. Thinking about the role of personality in that process can help you keep the costs down and the benefits up, even if it means stepping a bit out of your comfort zone.