Contrary to popular believe, being miserable doesn’t make you more likely to die at an early age, nor does being cheerful guarantee that you’ll live longer, according to new research from Oxford University appearing in the latest edition of the journal The Lancet.
As reported earlier this week by The Seattle Times and The Washington Post, medical statistics and epidemiology professor Richard Peto and his colleagues found that people’s happiness and other measurements of their overall well-being do not seen to have an impact on longevity.
“Believing things that aren’t true isn’t a good idea. There are enough scare stories about health,” the Oxford professor explained to The Seattle Times. “It’s such a common belief that stress and unhappiness causes death and disease but it’s actually the other way around. People should focus on the real issues that shorten their lives, like smoking and obesity.”
He noted that his team decided to look into the issue because of the pervasive belief that things like stress and unhappiness can cause a person to be more susceptible to disease, increasing the likelihood that negative people make themselves sick because they’re just not happy enough.
Findings show that morality risk is independent of happiness level
Peto and his colleagues analyzed statistics from the UK’s Million Women Study, a prospective study analyzing the causes of death in women between the ages of 50 and 69 between the years of 1996 and 2011, along with questionnaires and official medical and death records.
The women participating in the study answered questionnaires about how often they felt happy, healthy, in control, relaxed, depressed and/or stressed. Of the 720,000 patients involved in their analysis, the Oxford team found that 39 percent of them claimed to be happy on most occasions, while 44 percent said that they were usually happy and 17 percent were generally unhappy.
According to the Post, those who believed they were in poor health were far more likely to say that they were unhappy at the beginning of the study. However, when the responses were looked at statistically, neither stress nor unhappiness were found to be associated with an increased risk of mortality, though the Times pointed out that it is unclear if this would also apply to men.
Those who reported being happiest tended to be older, less educated women who did not smoke, regularly exercised, lived with a partner, and were actively involved in religious or secular group activities. They were also more likely to get a good night’s sleep, according to the study.
Peto told reporters that the research was “good news for the grumpy” and “refutes the large effects of unhappiness and stress on mortality that others have claimed.” However, the professor added that his team’s work was unlikely to change many people’s minds about the health risks of being anxious or unhappy. “People are still going to believe that stress causes heart attacks.”
Comments