Happiness by itself does not keep you from an early grave, a study of one million UK women has found. In the largest ever study on the link between happiness and mortality, happy and unhappy women were found to die at the same rate, once factors such as existing ill health and smoking were adjusted […]
Happiness by itself does not keep you from an early grave, a study of one million UK women has found.
In the largest ever study on the link between happiness and mortality, happy and unhappy women were found to die at the same rate, once factors such as existing ill health and smoking were adjusted for.
The findings fly in the face of previous, smaller studies that found unhappiness caused ill health, but Australian author Dr Bette Liu said those studies had confused cause and effect.
“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,” Dr Liu, from the University of NSW, said on Thursday.
Initially, women aged 50-69 years in the national breast-screening program were sent a questionnaire asking them to self-rate their health, happiness and stress.
Five out of six of the women said they were generally happy, but one in six said they were generally unhappy.
Then, 720,000 of the women were followed via their electronic health records for 10 years to analyse deaths from any cause, ischaemic heart disease or cancer. In all, 32,000 women died.
On a crude analysis, the researchers found that women who had reported being unhappy died at a rate 29% higher than those women who reported being happy most of the time.
However, this difference vanished completely once existing ill health such as hypertension, and lifestyle factors such as smoking were taken into account.
The authors believed that while unhappiness itself did not directly affect mortality, it might cause people smoke or be inactive, which in turn could affect mortality.
