Go ahead and sulk. Unhappiness won’t kill you.
A study published on Wednesday in The Lancet,
following one million middle-aged women in Britain for 10 years, finds
that the widely held view that happiness enhances health and longevity
is unfounded.
“Happiness and related measures of well-being do not appear to have any direct effect on mortality,” the researchers concluded.
“Good
news for the grumpy” is one way to interpret the findings, said Sir
Richard Peto, an author of the study and a professor of medical
statistics and epidemiology at the University of Oxford.
He
and his fellow researchers decided to look into the subject because, he
said, there is a widespread belief that stress and unhappiness cause
disease.
Such
beliefs can fuel a tendency to blame the sick for bringing ailments on
themselves by being negative, and to warn the well to cheer up or else.
The
new study says earlier research confused cause and effect, suggesting
that unhappiness made people ill when it is actually the other way
around.
The
results come from the so-called Million Women Study, which recruited
women ages 50 to 69 from 1996 to 2001, and tracked them with
questionnaires and official records of deaths and hospital admissions.
The questionnaires asked how often the women felt happy, in control,
relaxed and stressed, and also instructed them to rate their health and
list ailments like high blood pressure, diabetes, asthma, arthritis and depression or anxiety.
The
researchers included questions about happiness “because it’s something a
lot of people were interested in,” Professor Peto said.
When
the answers were analyzed statistically, unhappiness and stress were
not associated with an increased risk of death. It is not clear whether
the findings apply to men.
Professor
Peto said particularly important data came from 500,000 women who
reported on their baseline surveys that they were in good health, with
no history of heart disease, cancer, stroke or emphysema.
A
“substantial minority” of these healthy women said they were stressed
or unhappy, he said, but over the next decade they were no more likely
to die than were the women who were generally happy.
“This finding refutes the large effects of unhappiness and stress on mortality that others have claimed,” Dr. Peto said.
Unhappiness itself may not affect health directly, but it can do harm in other ways, by driving people to suicide, alcoholism or other dangerous behaviors, he warned.
This
type of study, which depends on participants’ self-assessments, is not
considered as reliable as a rigorously designed experiment in which
subjects are picked at random and assigned to a treatment or control
group. But the huge number of people in this study gives it power.
Still, some observers noted that measuring emotions is more nuanced and complex than simply declaring happiness or unhappiness.
“I
would have liked to see more discussion of how people translate these
complicated feelings into a self-report of happiness,” said Baruch
Fischhoff, a psychologist at Carnegie Mellon University
who studies decision-making, who was not involved in the study. “Think
about everything that’s going on in your life and tell me how happy you
are. Happiness is a squishy measure.”
The
results of earlier studies have been mixed, with some finding that
unhappiness causes illness and others showing no link, Dr. Fischhoff
said.
“It
looks to me like people have collected a lot of data without finding a
clear signal,” he said. “So if there is some correlation out there, it’s
not very big.”
An
editorial accompanying the study in The Lancet noted that it had “the
largest population so far in happiness studies,” and praised its
statistical methods. But it also said more research was needed.
Professor
Peto said he doubted that the new study would change many minds because
beliefs about the perils of unhappiness are so ingrained.
“People are still going to believe that stress causes heart attacks,” he said.
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