Researchers found unhappiness is not a direct cause of ill health and increased mortality; instead, it is ill health that makes us unhappy.
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According to a recent study, people’s decision to remain happy or unhappy, does not affect their health.
A median age of 59 years, the women were recruited to the study between 1996-2001.
Previous research has shown happiness is associated with a range of health conditions, including cardiovascular disease and disability levels.
Being unhappy or stressed does not increase the risk of ill-health and happy people are no more likely to live longer, a major new study has found. According to the responses, 39 percent of the women said they were happy “most of the time”, 44 percent stated they were “usually” happy, and 17 percent indicated they were unhappy (happy only “sometimes” or “rarely/never”).
Speaking about the findings, lead researcher Dr. Bette Liu from the University of New South Wales in Australia said, “Illness makes you unhappy, but unhappiness itself doesn’t make you ill”.
“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”. The team that presented their findings in The Lancet studied nearly 700,000 women in Britain.
About 20 percent of women had rated their health as “fair” or “poor” at the start of the study, while the other 80 percent had said their health was “excellent” or “good”.
Smoking, lack of exercise and living without a partner were all associated with unhappiness. The researchers followed up with the participants for around 10 years on an average, it was found out that during that timeperiod around 31,531 (4%) of them had died. However, those who suffered from poor health indicated that they were stressed, unhappy, not in control, and not feeling relaxed.
“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.
During the research, these women were asked after a period of three years how often did they feel happy.
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“Many still believe that stress or unhappiness can directly cause disease, but they are simply confusing cause and effect”. “Of course people who are ill tend to be unhappier than those who are well, but the UK Million Women Study shows that happiness and unhappiness do not themselves have any direct effect on death rates”.
