When it comes to a long life - happiness doesn't cause it to be shorter - but it doesn't cause it to be longer, either by 1kiki

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When it comes to a long life - happiness doesn't cause it to be shorter - but it doesn't cause it to be longer, either

POSTED BY: 1KIKI
UPDATED: Saturday, December 12, 2015 17:44
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Saturday, December 12, 2015 5:44 PM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

Happiness Doesn't Contribute to a Longer, Healthier Life

http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2015/12/happiness-doesnt-contr
ibute-longer-healthier-life?et_cid=4995903&et_rid=366206770&type=headline

Whether happy or sad, your mood does not directly influence how long you’ll live, according to the latest study by University of Oxford researchers.

Richard Peto and his fellow team of researchers set out to determine if the commonly widespread belief that unhappiness contributes to an increased risk of disease and early death holds true.

The study, published in The Lancet, tracked a million British women ranging in age from 50 to 69 who were already recruited for a study about cause-specific mortality. Three years after recruitment, the participants were asked how often they felt happy, in control, relaxed and stressed. They were also instructed to self-rate their health and list any history of ailments, such as high blood pressure, diabetes, asthma, arthritis, depression and anxiety.

“We aimed to establish whether, after allowing for the poor health and lifestyle of people who are unhappy, any robust evidence remains that happiness or related subjective measures of wellbeing directly reduce mortality,” wrote the study authors.

Out of 719,671 women in the main analysis, 39 percent reported being happy most of the time, 44 percent were ‘usually happy’ and 17 percent were unhappy.

Over the course of the 10-year study, four percent of the participants died, but death rates among the unhappy were no higher than those who said they were usually happy.

“Happiness and related measures of well-being do not appear to have any direct effect on mortality,” concluded the researchers.

The results of this robust study contradict previous findings that state over-worked, stress or depressed individuals cause themselves to become sick or unhealthy. But the researchers argue that it may actually be the other way around – that poor health often leads to higher levels of unhappiness.

Read more: Loneliness Triggers Cellular Changes, Weakens Immune System

“As in other studies, unhappiness was associated with deprivation, smoking, lack of exercise and not living with a partner. The strongest associations, however, were that the women who were already in poor health tended to say that they were unhappy, stressed, not in control and not relaxed,” wrote the researchers in a press release.

Although unhappiness may not directly relate to early death or illness, the researchers did note that low levels of happiness can lead to harmful behavior, such as excessive eating or drinking, smoking, or suicide.

Relying on self-assessment, especially when it comes to emotion, admittedly brings skepticism of any study’s results, but the large number of participants in the UK Million Women Study deem it more reliable. A separate study would need to be conducted to see if similar results occur in men.

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