In their first pass at the numbers that adjusted for age, the researchers found that women who said they were unhappy were 29 percent more likely to have died compared with their counterparts who were happy.
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The results are based on questionnaires from more than 715,000 British women aged 50 to 69 who were enrolled in a national breast cancer screening program in the late 1990s.
While not everyone may agree with the researcher’s conclusion, this is the biggest study to ever evaluate how happiness affects mortality.
He said it could have indirect effects if people started consuming large amounts of alcohol or massively overeating, but happiness itself “does not have any material, direct, effect on mortality”.
The 4 percent or almost 32,000 of the women who died were not unhappier than the rest.
With apologies to the hundreds of machines pressing self-help books at this very moment that preach the life-changing benefits of happiness, it is incumbent upon me to say: It will not save you from death. “We found no direct effect of unhappiness or stress on mortality, even in a ten-year study of a million women”, said Professor Sir Richard Peto of the University of Oxford in a statement.
Previous research linking happiness with health simply confused cause and effect, the researchers claim.
Dr Gavin Sandercock of the University of Essex said: ‘Stress is undoubtedly bad for us, it is linked to heart disease, it is linked to some cancers and it is linked to systemic inflammation.
The women who were most unhappy tended to come from more deprived backgrounds, live without a partner, smoke and take least exercise.
However, behaviors that develop from being unhappy, such as binge eating unhealthy meals, smoking, and leading sedentary lifestyle, may still contribute significantly to premature death. Among them are hedonic happiness that defines well-being through experiences of pleasure vs. displeasure; subjective well-being, which encompasses moods and emotions as well as one’s satisfaction with one’s life; and positive psychological well-being, which uses standard scales of happiness that have partly to do with how much one feels to have self-control. “But if you ask does it of itself have any direct effect on mortality, it doesn’t”, he said. The researchers found that 39 percent of the women said they were happy most of the time, 44 percent said they were usually happy and 17 percent said they were usually unhappy. “We found no direct effect of unhappiness or stress on mortality”, she said in a press release.
Because the study included only women, it’s not clear whether the results apply to men as well.
“After adjustment for these factors, no robust evidence remains that unhappiness or stress increase mortality or that being happy, relaxed, or in control reduces mortality”, write the authors.
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Similar studies have previously associated reduced mortality with happiness, being in control and feeling relaxed, without taking into account the impact of ill health on stress and unhappiness. “Cross-cultural studies could also shed light on the generalizability of interventions to promote happiness”.
