People may stop exercising or begin smoking because they’re unhappy, which would lead to poor health and increased risk of mortality.
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However, Oxford University researchers who contributed to the UK Million Women study say that these past studies generally do not account for unhappiness generated by poor health.
They say happiness is a good way to ensure good health and make you live longer.
Previous reports of reduced mortality being associated with happiness had not allowed properly for the strong effect of ill health on unhappiness and on stress.
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. He and his fellow researchers chose to look into the subject because, he said, there is a widespread belief that stress and unhappiness cause disease.
Dr Bette Liu, one of the researchers at the University of New South Wales in Australia, said: “Illness makes you unhappy, but unhappiness itself doesn’t make you ill”.
However, being miserable may make people behave in an unhealthy way – such as drinking heavily or harming yourself – which could then influence mortality. Surveying men could alter the results because there is a chance they could define happiness in a different way than women do.
Co-author Prof Sir Richard Peto, from the University of Oxford, said light smokers had double the risk of an early death and regular smokers had three times the risk of dying during the study period, but that happiness was “irrelevant”. Quite contradictory to the widely held notion that smiles can help you go miles, a study has established that mortality cannot be a direct corollary of being unhappy.
“Of course people who are ill tend to be unhappier than those who are well, but The Million Women Study shows that happiness and unhappiness do not themselves have any direct effect on death rates”, he said. The researchers reported that “the relation between happiness and the number of hours of sleep was J-shaped, with women reporting about 8 h sleep most likely to be generally happy”.
The study was funded by the UK Medical Research Council and Cancer Research UK. However, the mortality rate among the unhappy participants was no higher than the women who said they generally were happy.
However, some observers noted that measuring emotions is more complex than simply declaring happiness or unhappiness. The study adjusted for health factors (including hypertension, diabetes, asthma, arthritis, depression and anxiety) and lifestyle factors (including smoking) that were already present at the baseline measurement phase. They explain that unhappy people who suffer from illness, smoke or who are inactive, for instance, feel unhappy due to their health. The less education women achieved, the happier they were, too.
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The effects of overall wellbeing and happiness among people are given much attention.
