Your happiness will not make you live longer and your misfortune will not shorten your days. The study that defends this theory, the “UK Million Women Study”, was conducted by researchers from Oxford (United Kingdom) and published in The Lancet.
Same death rate in happy and unhappy people
Dr. Bette Liu, lead author of the study, and a team of scientists followed 700,000 British women, aged 59 on average, for almost ten years. 39% of participants considered themselves happy most of the time, 44% usually and 17% unhappy.
30,000 women died during the 10 years of follow-up. Among the deaths, the death rate was the same for unhappy women as for happy women.
No link between unhappiness and increased mortality
According to the researchers, the size of the sample used for this work shows that there is no link between unhappiness and increased mortality among women. If illness can make you unhappy, unhappiness does not make you sick, according to Bette Liu.
“Obviously sick people tend to be more unhappy than healthy people, but this research demonstrates that happiness and unhappiness by themselves have no direct impact on the rate of death. mortality“, concludes Doctor Peto.
No link between stress and disease development
“Many still believe that the stress or misfortune can directly cause the disease, but they simply confuse cause and effect”, also affirms doctor Richard Peto, co-author of the study.
The researchers noted that unhappiness often went hand in hand with smoking, sedentary lifestyle, health problems, etc. His bad habits, on the other hand, can on their own cause diseases…
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