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Does your happiness quota add up to disease or longevity?
What does it mean to be healthy?
Is it just the absence of disease? Or is the picture bigger than just what is happening to our physical bodies?
We speak of ‘mental health’ as the stability of our mental and emotional state.
The World Health Organization defines health as a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.
The connection between physical health and mental health will probably not surprise you. It’s hard to feel positive when you’re feeling ill. And negative emotional states like depression or anxiety can certainly bring about physical symptoms.
What may surprise you is how much serious research is going into investigating this connection.
At the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, there is actually a Center for Health and Happiness. Its goal is “to build a rigorous, interdisciplinary science to understand the interplay between psychological well-being and physical health for the benefit of individuals and communities around the globe.”
Harvard scientists and other researchers around the world are investigating the emotion-health connection. Their findings have something to teach us about the everyday choices we make. They affect our health more than we think.
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Happy people live longer
A 2011 British study found that older adults who reported feeling happy and content tended to live longer than others.
Andrew Steptoe of the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at University College of London monitored positive affect (happiness, peacefulness, and excitement) and negative affect (hostility and anxiety) in 3,850 people ages 52 to 79.
Over a period of five years, those who reported the highest levels of positive affect were 35 percent less likely to die.
In China, the town of Rugao is known as the “longevity town.” As of 2008, there were 251 people over the age of 100 in Rugao, or 17 centenarians per 100,000 people.
In 2014, researchers at the School of Life Sciences at Fudan University in China looked into the possible relationship between subjective well-being (SWB) and longevity in Rugao.
Subjective well-being means how a person evaluates their own life in terms of happiness and health.
The study concluded that high levels of subjective well-being and positive affect were associated with “extreme longevity” (living past 100 years old).
Finally, a 2018 British study confirms that positive emotions are associated with health and longevity.
Using data on almost 4500 participants ages 60 and older, researchers at Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore found that every increase of one point on a happiness score lowered the chance of dying due to any cause among participants by an additional nine percent.
“The findings indicate that even small increments in happiness may be beneficial to older people’s longevity,” explained Assistant Professor Rahul Malhotra, Head of Research at Duke-NUS’ Centre for Ageing Research and Education.
In this study, happiness was measured by asking the survey participants how often in the past week they experienced the following: ‘I felt happy’, ‘I enjoyed life’ and ‘I felt hopeful about the future.”
How to improve your “happiness quotient”
No one is happy all of the time. But there are many, many ways to increase the amount of time you spend feeling generally satisfied and even extremely content with your life.
Achieving a feeling of well-being involves using all your senses, as well as your physical body.
It’s been proven that both the words we use and the music we listen to can have a profound effect on our emotional health, either positively or negatively.
In fact, music therapy has been proven to have healing power over cancer, anxiety and other illnesses.
Meditation is a proven modality that can calm anxiety, and control heart disease. You don’t need to be a meditation master to get these benefits. Just start by sitting still, closing your eyes and following your breathing.
Studies have shown that exercise, even ten minutes a day, can alleviate depressed and sad feelings. By exercising regularly, you’re lifting your mood and heading off heart disease and other ailments that come with a sedentary lifestyle.
Something as simple as keeping the right plants in your home can prevent anxiety, boost the immune system and help you sleep better.
Finally, cultivating an attitude of gratitude for the simple gifts in your life has proven health benefits, both mental and physical.
Sources:
- Happy older people live longer — Age and Ageing
- Positive affect measured using ecological momentary assessment and survival in older men and women — Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
- Health and happiness facts — Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health
By Joyce Hollman
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