A new study published on Wednesday in the publication The Lancet revealed that happiness has nothing to do with better health and longer life.
The new study has observed one million middle-aged women in Britain in a span of ten years. And according to the researchers, "happiness and related measures of well-being do not appear to have any direct effect on mortality."
According to The New York Times, the results of the study came from the "Million Women Study," where women aged 50 to 69 were observed fom 1996 to 2001. These women were given questionnaires to answer, which consisted of questions about how often they felt happy, in control, relaxed and stressed. Their official records of deaths and hospitalizations were tracked, as well. And they were regularly asked to rate their heath. Furthermore, the women were asked to list diseases and ailments like diabetes, high blood pressure, arthritis, asthma, depression, or asthma.
Ultimately, when the data were analyzed statistically by the researchers, they found out that there was no direct association between happiness and health and mortality.
Significant results of the study included an observation coming from approximately 500,000 women who certified that they were in good health and they have no history of heart disease, cancer, stroke and emphysema but then a "substantial minority" ascertained that they were stressed and unhappy. And according to the researchers, these women are likely to die in the decade after than those women who were generally happy.
Richard Peto, the author of the study and a medical statistics and epidemiology professor in the University of Oxford, said that the researchers wanted to look upon the subject of the new study because they wanted to prove if stress and unhappiness, indeed, cause disease, as many believe.
"Believing things that aren't true isn't a good idea. There are enough scare stories about health," Richard Peto said.
