Happiness Doesn’t Lead to Longer, Healthier Life, Study Says

For the study, which was published this week in The Lancet, Liu and her colleagues analyzed data collected from more than 700,000 British women, aged 55 to 63, who had been recruited into the University of Oxford’s Million Women Study between 1996 and 2001. But the researchers argue that it may actually be the other way around – that poor health often leads to higher levels of unhappiness.
According to study authors, poor health may be the thing that comes first, and can make a person unhappy, stressed, or feel out of control. However, the researchers also found out that women who said that they were happy had the same chances of dying as the women who said that they were unhappy.
An analysis of those answers revealed that women were more likely to report being happy if they were older, physically active, and not economically deprived, and if they did not smoke, got adequate sleep (but not too much), had a partner, and either belonged to a religious group or participated in social activities. The researchers found that happiness and similar measures of a well-being did not have a direct effect on human mortality rates. After a decade of tracking the women, 4 percent had died. “Cross-cultural studies could also shed light on the generalisability of interventions to promote happiness”. She explained that illness can make people unhappy, but unhappiness does not make people ill.
However, the huge sample size of the study proves that unhappiness is not a direct cause of any major increase in overall death rates among women.
Upon reaching the conclusion, the researchers therefore wrote in their study, “Our large prospective study shows no robust evidence that happiness itself reduces cardiac, cancer, or overall mortality”.
From survey responses and health consequences, and after allowing for differences that were already present in health and lifestyle, the death rate for happy and unhappy women was the same, the release said. This pattern persisted even for deaths caused by cancer or heart disease. They were asked questions about happiness, control, relaxation, and stress.
“Many still believe that stress or unhappiness can directly cause disease, but they are simply confusing cause and effect”, said Sir Richard Peto, of the University of Oxford