Happiness is good for your health
Another compelling reason for paying more systematic attention to our own happiness and our children’s happiness is that happy people are physically healthier and live longer. Being happy is seriously good for your health.
Abundant scientific evidence shows that happy people live longer than unhappy people, other things being equal. This correlation between happiness and longevity was illustrated by the ‘nun study’, in which scientists analysed handwritten autobiographies written many years earlier by a group of very elderly Catholic nuns. The results showed that those individuals who had expressed the most positive emotions when they were in their early twenties were significantly more likely to be alive six decades later. The nuns whose youthful writings had revealed the sunniest outlook lived several years longer on average.
The most extreme and obvious manifestation of the link between happiness and lifespan is suicide, which one writer described as the sincerest form of criticism that a life can receive. The suicide rate among young people in the UK has increased markedly over the past 20–30 years, especially among males. Indeed, suicide is now the most common cause of death among young men, accounting for more than a fifth of all deaths in males aged 15–24. And as you would expect, unhappy people are statistically much more likely than happy people to kill themselves, other things being equal. One large investigation in Finland, for example, found that very unhappy people were seven times more likely to commit suicide over the following 20 years than those who rated themselves as very happy.
For every person who actually commits suicide there are many more who think about doing it. In fact, cases of harbouring suicidal thoughts outnumber actual suicides by around 400 to 1. The largest survey of its kind in the UK found that 1 in every 25 men and women had contemplated suicide at some point during the preceding year. In another demonstration of how crucial personal relationships are to happiness, the same study found that people were much less likely to have considered suicide if they were married or cohabiting, or if they felt they had good social support from friends and relatives.
More generally, low mood and depression remain serious and widespread problems. A few years ago a large study discovered that one out of every six adults in Britain was suffering from some form of depression or anxiety (so-called neurotic disorders).1 Mental health problems of this sort account for a third of all days lost from work in the UK due to ill health, and a fifth of all visits to GPs. Depression can produce serious impairments in social and physical functioning that are as disabling as many physical illnesses. The World Health Organization has estimated that by the year 2020 depression will be the second biggest cause of disability in the world, after cardiovascular disease. Depression is not just an adult problem either. On the contrary, it is surprisingly prevalent and underdiagnosed among children, in whom the symptoms can be hard to spot. A major study found that 4 per cent of 5–15-year-olds in Britain were suffering from an emotional disorder involving anxiety or depression.
So, being happy can make a big difference to your chances of survival, especially if you are a young man who might otherwise be at risk of committing suicide. However, a longer life is not the only dividend – happy people also enjoy better physical health while they are alive. Numerous studies have found that happy people typically score better than unhappy people both in terms of how they perceive their own health (‘subjective health’) and how their health is judged by doctors (‘objective health’). For example, happy people tend to have lower blood pressure. Some recent research, which tracked more than 22,000 Finnish twins over an 11-year period, found that those who were dissatisfied with their life were much more likely to be unable to work in later years because of mental or physical health problems.
One way in which happiness promotes physical health is by providing a buffer against stress. Several of the key building blocks of happiness, including personal relationships, optimism, wisdom and humour, help to protect us from the stressful effects of adversity. Happy people, with the support of friends and family, are able to take more knocks. Happiness assists health in other ways as well. There is good evidence, for example, that happy people tend to have healthier lifestyles. Among other things, they are statistically less likely than unhappy people to smoke, abuse alcohol, eat badly or be physically inactive. This probably has something to do with their personal relationships.
The fact that happiness promotes physical health should come as no surprise, given what scientists know about the intimate links between mental and emotional states and physical health. You are probably familiar with the idea that negative states of mind such as stress, anxiety and depression can contribute to physical illness. For example, there is abundant evidence that prolonged psychological stress can increase vulnerability to bacterial and viral infections by impairing the functioning of the immune system. Prolonged stress can also increase the risk of heart disease and stroke. Well, the converse is also true: positive states of mind can make us healthier.
Scientists have been unearthing more and more links between positive mental states and measurable benefits to physical health. In particular, experimental studies have uncovered evidence that happiness is associated with better functioning of the immune system. In one experiment, individuals who naturally tended to respond more positively to depressing or potentially threatening experiences were found to display a stronger immune response when their immune system was challenged by giving them an influenza vaccination. The implication of such findings is that positive psychological and emotional states bolster the body’s immune defences. Recent research has even shown that beneficial changes in immune function can be produced by meditation. Carefully controlled experiments have demonstrated that a widely used form of meditation can elicit a significant rise in the number of antibodies produced in response to a vaccination. (However, the most noticeable long-term effect of meditation, according to its practitioners, is happiness.)
Is there anything bad about happiness?
So far, then, we have seen that happy people are typically more successful at school and at work, have better social lives, are more creative, live longer, and enjoy better health. And, of course, they are happy, which is arguably the most important thing of all. But despite all these powerful attractions, the state of happiness has not always enjoyed an entirely untainted image. Over the years it has been vilified on various grounds, including claims that it leads to complacency, immorality, self-delusion and even death.
One ancient belief is that pursuing happiness puts us on a path to self-destruction. In their quest for happiness, it is said, people indulge in excesses that are bad for them and bad for others. This notion stems from a basic confusion between happiness and pleasure. There are good reasons for being cautious about the shallow pursuit of pleasure, which does have the potential to be stultifying or self-destructive. But pleasure is not the same as happiness, and a life built on the pursuit of pleasure alone is unlikely to be truly happy.
Another commonplace criticism is that happiness is a form of self-deluding fantasy which blinds us to the awful realities of life or, at the very least, makes us complacent. According to some cynics, the world is such a ghastly place that the only way for intelligent people to be happy is to cut themselves off from reality and live in a fog of self-delusion. When the French President Charles de Gaulle was once asked if he was a happy man, he replied: ‘What sort of fool do you take me for?’ Aldous Huxley famously explored this idea in his 1932 novel Brave New World – a chilling futuristic vision of an all-powerful state in which the masses are kept under control with a drug called