Positive experiences are not psychologically positive for everyone.

Research suggests that good fortune may be associated with poorer health among people with low self-esteem.

Experiences that contradict our self-image can themselves become psychologically unsettling.

Imagine something wonderful just happened. You got the job you'd been circling for years. Or the acceptance letter arrived from your dream school.

By any measure, this should be a good day.

And yet, somewhere underneath the relief, there's a discomfort you can't name.

You should be celebrating but you feel a bit bothered.

You wonder: Why has happiness come with a quiet sadness?

When Good Fortune Backfires

In 1989, psychologists Jonathon Brown and Kathleen McGill studied 261 female students in grades 7 through 11.

First, they measured each student's self-esteem. Then they recorded the positive and negative life events each student had experienced over the previous year, along with how often they had been physically sick. Next, they analyzed how these factors were related.

Here is what they found.

The first result is the one you'd predict: students who had experienced more negative events, such as losses and conflicts, got sick more often. Negative life events were associated with poorer health.

Among people........

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