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Could more stress from work also make you happier? If so, many readers must feel they're the happiest people in the world.

But this seeming contradiction was the finding of a recent Gallup study: ” U.S. workers who email for work and who spend more hours working remotely outside of normal working hours are more likely to experience a substantial amount of stress on any given day than workers who do not exhibit these behaviors. Nearly half of workers who ‘frequently' email for work outside of normal working hours report experiencing stress “a lot of the day yesterday,” compared with the 36% experiencing stress who never email for work.”

However, while workers report higher stress from being tied to mobile devices while away from the office, they also report greater satisfaction: “In seeming contrast to the relationship between the use of mobile technology for work and its relationship to elevated daily stress, workers who email or work remotely outside of normal working hours also rate their lives better than their counterparts who do not. As with stress, frequency of emailing outside of work and hours spent working remotely are closely linked to the percentage of respondents who are ‘thriving.'”

So how to rationalize this seeming contradiction?

The report concludes: “It is possible that by emailing or working remotely outside of normal hours, workers associate such behaviors with greater professional success and accomplishment, thus elevating how they think about and evaluate their lives more generally. At the same time, the elevated levels of stress associated with these behaviors may fall into what some refer to as ‘productive stress.' For some workers this type of stress may be a desirable emotional state that is associated with greater urgency and more productive work days. Job type may also be a factor in these results; more personally rewarding occupations for many people also may be the type that demand more mobile technology use and that typically come with elevated stress levels.”