Go ahead and sulk. Unhappiness won’t kill you.A study published on Wednesday in The Lancet, following 1 million middle-aged women in Britain for 10 years, finds that the widely held view that happiness enhances health and longevity is unfounded.“Happiness and related measures of well-being do not appear to have any direct effect on mortality,” the researchers concluded.
“Good news for the grumpy” is one way to interpret the findings, said Sir Richard Peto, an author of the study and a professor of medical statistics and epidemiology at the University of Oxford. He and his fellow researchers decided to look into the subject because, he said, there is a widespread belief that stress and unhappiness cause disease.The results come from the Million Women Study, which recruited women aged 50 to 69 from 1996 to 2001, and tracked them with questionnaires and official records of deaths and hospital admissions. The questionnaires asked how often the women felt happy, in control, relaxed and stressed, and also instructed them to rate their health and list ailments like high blood pressure, diabetes, asthma, arthritis and depression or anxiety.When the answers were analyzed statistically, unhappiness and stress were not associated with an increased risk of death. It is not clear whether the findings apply to men.Peto said particularly important data came from 500,000 women who reported on their baseline surveys that they were in good health, with no history of heart disease, cancer, stroke or emphysema. A “substantial minority” of these healthy women said they were stressed or unhappy, he said, but over the next decade they were no more likely to die than were the women who were generally happy.“This finding refutes the large effects of unhappiness and stress on mortality that others have claimed,” Peto said.Unhappiness itself may not affect health directly, but it can do harm in other ways, by driving people to suicide, alcoholism or other dangerous behaviors, he warned. Some observers noted that measuring emotions is more nuanced and complex than simply declaring happiness or unhappiness.“I would have liked to see more discussion of how people translate these complicated feelings into a self-report of happiness,” said Baruch Fischhoff, a psychologist at Carnegie Mellon University who studies decision-making, who was not involved in the study. “Think about everything that’s going on in your life and tell me how happy you are. Happiness is a squishy measure.”
© 2015 New York Times News Service
“Good news for the grumpy” is one way to interpret the findings, said Sir Richard Peto, an author of the study and a professor of medical statistics and epidemiology at the University of Oxford. He and his fellow researchers decided to look into the subject because, he said, there is a widespread belief that stress and unhappiness cause disease.The results come from the Million Women Study, which recruited women aged 50 to 69 from 1996 to 2001, and tracked them with questionnaires and official records of deaths and hospital admissions. The questionnaires asked how often the women felt happy, in control, relaxed and stressed, and also instructed them to rate their health and list ailments like high blood pressure, diabetes, asthma, arthritis and depression or anxiety.When the answers were analyzed statistically, unhappiness and stress were not associated with an increased risk of death. It is not clear whether the findings apply to men.Peto said particularly important data came from 500,000 women who reported on their baseline surveys that they were in good health, with no history of heart disease, cancer, stroke or emphysema. A “substantial minority” of these healthy women said they were stressed or unhappy, he said, but over the next decade they were no more likely to die than were the women who were generally happy.“This finding refutes the large effects of unhappiness and stress on mortality that others have claimed,” Peto said.Unhappiness itself may not affect health directly, but it can do harm in other ways, by driving people to suicide, alcoholism or other dangerous behaviors, he warned. Some observers noted that measuring emotions is more nuanced and complex than simply declaring happiness or unhappiness.“I would have liked to see more discussion of how people translate these complicated feelings into a self-report of happiness,” said Baruch Fischhoff, a psychologist at Carnegie Mellon University who studies decision-making, who was not involved in the study. “Think about everything that’s going on in your life and tell me how happy you are. Happiness is a squishy measure.”
© 2015 New York Times News Service
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