  Life events can dramatically affect our psychological state and work
performance. Stress, for example, has been linked to professional
dissatisfaction, increased anxiety, and workplace burnout. We explore the
impact of positive and negative life events on a number of psychological
constructs through a multi-month longitudinal study of hospital and aerospace
workers. Through causal inference, we demonstrate that positive life events
increase positive affect, while negative events increase stress, anxiety and
negative affect. While most events have a transient effect on psychological
states, major negative events, like illness or attending a funeral, can reduce
positive affect for multiple days. Next, we assess whether these events can be
detected through wearable sensors, which can cheaply and unobtrusively monitor
health-related factors. We show that these sensors paired with embedding-based
learning models can be used ``in the wild'' to capture atypical life events in
hundreds of workers across both datasets. Overall our results suggest that
automated interventions based on physiological sensing may be feasible to help
workers regulate the negative effects of life events.
