Contrary to our popular belief that happy people live longer, a new study by the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Australia, has revealed that happiness has no connection with how many years people live during their lifetime.
According to the study, while it is true that unhappy people tend to have shorter lives, being ill in the first place makes people unhappy. It further added that previous reports of reduced mortality associated with happiness, could be due to the increased mortality of people who are unhappy because of their poor health.
“Illness makes you unhappy, but unhappiness itself doesn’t make you ill. We found no direct effect of unhappiness or stress on mortality,” lead author of the study from UNSW, Bette Liu said in a statement.
The study is based on data from over 700,000 women in the United Kingdom, collected under the Million Women Study. Participants in the survey were said to have been recruited between 1996 and 2001. They were made to fill in electronic questionnaires detailing their health, lifestyle and well-being. The surveys were conducted regularly for up to a decade.
The research team then looked for correlations between reported happiness and deaths, and found that women who were unhappy were 29% more likely to die over the 10-year period, compared with the women who were happy most of the time. However, when poor health and lifestyle factors such as smoking, obesity and physical inactivity were taken into account, no link between happiness and length of life was found.
Detail of the findings of the study revealed that of 719,671 women in the main analyses (median age 59-years [IQR 55–63]), 39% (282 619) reported being happy most of the time, 44% (315 874) usually happy, and 17% (121 178) unhappy. During the 10-year (SD 2) study, 4% (31 531) of participants died. Self-rated poor health was strongly associated with unhappiness. But after adjustment for self-rated health, treatment for hypertension, diabetes, asthma, arthritis, depression, or anxiety, and several sociodemographic and lifestyle factors (including smoking, deprivation, and body-mass index), unhappiness was not associated with mortality (adjusted RR for unhappy vs happy most of the time 0·98, 95% CI 0·94–1·01), from ischaemic heart disease (0·97, 0·87–1·10), or from cancer (0·98, 0·93–1·02). Findings were similarly null for related measures such as stress or lack of control.
The researchers then concluded that happiness or unhappiness themselves did not affect death rates. Death rates are affected by the health status of the person.
Richard Peto, co-author of the study and professor of medical statistics and epidemiology at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, said people should stop believing that happiness has an effect on mortality. He was quoted as saying, “Many still believe that stress or unhappiness can directly cause disease, but they are simply confusing cause and effect.”
Happiness is a subjective category and the study used a large but quite specific database. As a result, more research is required to establish whether the conclusion applies to men—who may experience happiness differently from women—as well as people of other age categories and cultures.
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