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The idea that an event in daily life is stressful, in and of itself, has fallen out of favor in psychology. Even an experience as positive as a job promotion or marriage can lead some people to recover emotionally from the toll of change—for weeks. Classic theories of stress regard any event as stressful if it involves a change from the status quo. Cognitive theories take this one step further and define a stressful experience as one that individuals perceive as beyond their capacity to cope.
Consider a mundane example, such as the situation Teri now faces. She has the chance to go on vacation with a friend to a new and exotic destination. For years, she has dreamed of visiting this exact spot. But now faced with the prospect of actually going there, she’s filled with an inexplicable sense of dread. The cognitive approach would regard this situation as understandable if Teri believes the trip will take her too far out of her comfort zone. As desirable as it is “objectively,” Teri construes it as full of possible pitfalls, from wearing the wrong clothes to feeling guilty about leaving her family behind. As a result of her hemming and hawing, the friend withdraws the invitation; Teri is left feeling regret and self-recrimination.
The Neurotic’s Approach to Life Events
In a new paper by Mario Wenzel and colleagues of the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz (2026), one explanation for Teri’s internal strife is that she’s high in neuroticism. People who are prone to worry, anxiety, and sadness tend to wring misery out of even the most objectively positive of situations. Through a process known as “stress generation,” they make their lives worse in much the same way Teri did. Neurotic individuals create stress by virtue of their ineffective ways of handling situations.
However, the neurotic individual can change the narrative. Again, thinking of appraisal as a subjective process, Teri could work on calming herself down (that is, coping), eventually recovering and potentially learning from the experience. Whether she can do so will depend on breaking her cycle of negativity and spinning her interpretation of the events in her life from a positive perspective.
Testing Neuroticism’s Role in Stress Regulation
Pulling together scores from six separate data sets on adult samples, Wenzel and colleagues adopted what they call an “explanatory” (versus experimental) approach to tracking daily variations in frequency of negative and positive events in relation to levels of neuroticism. These included ratings of distress associated with “microstressors,” such as time pressure or traffic jams on the way to work. Measures of neuroticism included standard personality trait inventories as well as their opposite, emotional stability. The authors also included a measure of extraversion.
In the overall model testing, positive-negative event frequency and intensity were treated as predictors of reactivity, which, in turn, were used to predict the positive-to-negative ratio effect. Neuroticism and extraversion were predictors of all positive-negative event ratings. One piece of the model included “positive-negative affect inertia.” By this, the authors meant that in rating individual events, people can carry over the emotional impact of previous events. Your bad mood, in other words, can affect your rating of an event, not the event.
When all these factors were entered into the predictive model, neuroticism emerged as the culprit in explaining who rated their daily events as more negative, both in frequency and intensity. The highly neurotic also were more emotionally affected by these events, and it took them longer to recover—that “inertia” factor. Looking at the positive events, neuroticism played no role in their frequency or intensity. As the authors concluded, “positive affect among neurotic individuals cannot be attributed solely to reduced exposure to positive experiences” (p. 103).
Daily, then, highly neurotic people perceive events as more stressful, even when these events were not “objectively” negative. As a result, their emotions become more volatile, and it takes them longer to move on.
Moving Onward and Upward
These findings have important clinical implications, according to the authors. The biggest problem the highly neurotic face is their tendency to put a negative spin on events. Like Teri, they look for the downside in a situation and then wring as much negativity out of it as possible.
If, as the cognitive theory of stress maintains, it is these negative appraisals that influence the ability to cope, then it seems that the highly neurotic should be prime candidates for trying to turn these appraisals around. First, they can be helped by learning to take a less negatively biased approach to the events that happen to them daily. Second, given that appraisals and reactivity were separated in this study, they can then work on lowering the effect these events have on their equanimity.
Neuroticism Essential Reads
By tracking daily variations in event occurrence, perception, and emotional well-being, the authors were indeed able to “explain” the internal workings of the highly neurotic. The study also shows the importance of microstressors to well-being. If you find even the slightest annoyance sets you off, you can benefit from turning down your stress signals and finding some positive meaning in the event, or at least not letting it get to you.
To sum up, neuroticism is more than a personality trait. This tendency to worry and expect the worst can become a self-fulfilling prophecy if you always see events through a negative lens. The path to fulfillment may be paved with rocky stressors, but by switching to a more positive interpretation, you can leave the stressors behind.
