Birthday Celebrant (Photo : Reuters/Jim Young)
Happiness can make people feel better, but a new study shows that being happy will not help people to live longer. The decade-long United Kingdom research repudiates previous research that showed being sad or stressed out will lead to bad health and early death. It found no direct link between a person's emotional state in terms of wellbeing and its effect on longevity.
The 10-year UK Million Women Study was recently published in The Lancet. It included one million UK women, and found that previous studies that connected happiness and mortality mixed up cause and effect.
Researchers reported that severely poor health can cause people to be sad and depressed. That is why unhappiness is often linked to early death.
However, the huge sample size of the study proves that unhappiness is not a direct cause of any major increase in overall death rates among women. It is true for heart disease, cancer, and overall mortality; and also unhappiness and stress.
After joining the UK study, over 715,000 participants were sent a questionnaire three years later. The volunteers aged 50 to 69 years old had joined a breast cancer screening program during the 1990s. They were asked to rate their happiness, relaxation, stress, health, and feelings of control.
A big majority of five in six women reported that they were generally happy. However, one in six UK women shared they were generally unhappy.
Feelings of unhappiness were most linked to factors such as lack of exercise, smoking, and not having a live-in partner. However, women who were already very ill reported that they were unhappy, not relaxed, and stressed out.
Researchers learned that the overall death rate among unhappy women was the same as those who were generally happy, according to The Independent. This factored in health and lifestyle differences.
Lead author Dr. Bette Liu now works at the University of New South Wales in Australia. She explained that illness can make people unhappy, but unhappiness does not make people ill.
Nonetheless, some people disagree with the study's findings, including 69-year-old Hazel Newton of Sheffield, England. She believes that her positive attitude helped her to recover from a stroke many years ago, according to CBS News.
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