While prior research has suggested the possibility a link between depression and death, new research led by the University of Oxford’s Professor Sir Richard Peto has found the opposite to not necessarily be true: being happy may not extend your life – or at least, the link between happiness and longevity might not be as strong as previously indicated by prior research.
The new study, a massive one analyzing 700,000 British women, compared the mortality rates of unhappy women to those who were happy and found the rates to be roughly the same.
In the study, which was published in the journal The Lancet, Peto and his colleagues examined data compiled by the UK Million Women Study in which researchers tracked the long-term health outcomes of women. Analysis of the women — none of whom exhibited any serious health conditions at the onset of the initial study — began at age 59 and included a series of questionnaires covering mental health and well-being.
Of the women involved in the study, 39 percent reported that they were happy most of the time while 44 percent claimed they were usually happy and the rest, the remaining 17 percent, said they were unhappy.
The researchers found that while unhappiness was linked to self-reported poor health, no such link could be established between unhappiness and mortality.
Based on their findings, the researchers suggest that it’s not unhappiness that causes poor health – instead, it’s poor health that causes unhappiness.
Peto was quoted by Forbes as having explained that there is a large number of people who “still believe that stress or unhappiness can directly cause disease, but they are simply confusing cause and effect.”
Dr. Bette Liu, one of the researchers behind the study, further iterated the point in stating that sickness can induce unhappiness, but unhappiness alone is not enough to make you sick.
Illness makes you unhappy, but unhappiness itself doesn’t make you ill (…) We found no direct effect of unhappiness or stress on mortality, even in a ten-year study of a million women.
Liu noted that in their research, they “found no direct effect of unhappiness or stress on mortality, even in a ten-year study of a million women.”
Believing things that aren’t true isn’t a good idea (…) There are enough scare stories about health.
The New York Times reported that misconceptions regarding happiness and health can fuel tendencies to blame the sick’s ailments on their negativity, but as Peto noted in an interview, it’s not a good idea to belief things that aren’t true.
