It has been widely accepted that being happy lengthens a person's lifespan and can even promote good health but a recent study was published at it negates the globally accepted notion.
According to a study published by The Lancet, there is no happiness does not have any significant influence to having a healthier and longer life. The respondents of the study are middle-aged women living in Britain who were monitored and interviewed regularly.
The researchers concluded, "Happiness and related measures of well-being do not appear to have any direct effect on mortality."
Since 1996 to 2001, 719,671 women from the Million Women Study participated in the experiment. The data was examined and interpreted by a team led by Dr. Bette Liu, epidemiologist at the University of New South Wales in Sydney.
In the surveys, researchers asked the respondents how often they were happy. 83% of the respondents were considered happy while the remaining 17% said "sometimes" happy or "rarely/never" happy. Simultaneously, the respondents were also asked to rate their health status. For ten years, the researchers followed each respondent and by the tenth year, 31,531 of them have already died.
In the middle of the research, the researchers considered that there could be a link between happiness and longevity. They found out that unhappy respondents had 29 percent more chances of dying compared to the respondents who were considered happy. But as the study progressed, the unhappy respondents were also had poor health. Thus, it was poor health that increased their chances of death instead of unhappiness.
The researchers included questions about happiness "because it's something a lot of people were interested in." A University of Oxford professor of medical statistics and epidemiology, Richard Peto suggests that it is not happiness itself that promotes health. Instead, things that negate premature death like good health makes an individual happy.
The New York Times says, "The new study says earlier research confused cause and effect, suggesting that unhappiness made people ill when it is actually the other way around."
It is poor health that causes the person to die prematurely and not the other way around.
This result of this research cannot be translated or applied to the male demographic.
