One major factor is how people feel about what they’re trudging toward. When the Canadian government studied its citizens’ commuting habits and preferences closely in the mid-aughts, it found that people’s attitudes toward their jobs mattered a lot: The probability that people who liked their work “a great deal” also liked commuting was 64 percent; for those who strongly disliked their work, it was 10 percent. Getting paid well doesn’t hurt either: A Swiss researcher found that people who commute an hour would have to be paid 40 percent more in order to be as happy in life as someone who lives and works in a single neighborhood.

At first glance, it would seem like mode of transport matters a lot too. The Canadians found that only 23 percent of workers who took public transit enjoyed their commute, while that was true of 39 percent of drivers.

But for most people something else trumps mode of transport (and nearly everything else) as a predictor of whether someone would enjoy her commute: how long it takes. It turns out that public-transit commutes tend to be longer than commutes in cars, and when duration was held constant, commuters seemed just as (dis)pleased with subways and buses as with cars. In a 2006 study, researchers who surveyed 208 suburban New Yorkers who took the train to Manhattan arrived at a pretty clear-cut relationship: The longer the commute, the more stressed-out someone will be.

But there was one tiny, peculiar group whom the Canadian government found in its data—3 percent of respondents—who claimed that commuting was the best part of their day—and who didn’t seem as fazed by lengthy commutes. Who on Earth were these people?

They were bikers, mostly. Nineteen percent of people who rode their bikes to work said commuting was their most delightful daily activity, compared to only 2 percent of drivers who felt the same way. (People who walked to work were also significantly more likely to enjoy commuting than people who drove, but biking was yet a stronger predictor.)

Unfortunately for many workers, a short commute or biking may not be options. Whether a worker decides to take a train, drive a car, or bike, and how long the trip lasts, are more determined by what’s available (or cost-effective or safe) given the location of their office vis-a-vis their home than it is about what they’d prefer to do under perfect circumstances of their own creation.

But external factors aren’t everything: Recently, a team of researchers led by Jon Jachimowicz, a doctoral student studying management at Columbia Business School, and Julia Lee, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, identified a personality trait that seems to dictate how much of a toll a commute takes on any given person: self-control. In the study, they found that people with lower levels of self-control were more emotionally exhausted by long commutes. “We find … that that then also predicts whether or not they leave the organization six months later,” Jachimowicz told me.