Stress: It doesn’t make you ill

After analyzing the data, the researchers found that there was no association with unhappiness and stress, to an increased risk of death.

The researchers sourced their data from the UK Million Women Study.

Previous studies have linked happiness to longevity but researchers now say there’s no such scientific connection. About 720,000 of the 1 million women, with a median age of 59, were involved in their main analysis.

He said it could have indirect effects if people started consuming large amounts of alcohol or massively overeating, but happiness itself “does not have any material, direct, effect on mortality”. According to the study, over the following 10 years, follow-up assessments revealed that more than 30,000 (4 percent) of the participants had passed away.

With apologies to the hundreds of machines pressing self-help books at this very moment that preach the life-changing benefits of happiness, it is incumbent upon me to say: It will not save you from death.

The study found that happiness itself has no direct effect on mortality, and that the widespread but mistaken belief that unhappiness and stress directly cause ill health came from studies that had simply confused cause and effect.

Previous reports of reduced mortality being associated with happiness had not allowed properly for the strong effect of ill health on unhappiness and on stress.

The effects of happiness and wellbeing on society are becoming increasingly studied.

Barrington-Leigh said the study is powerful because all of the nuns were young and relatively healthy when they entered the convent, yet their happiness level at that young age corresponded to an earlier or later death.

However, neither unhappiness, nor related factors such as feeling stressed or out of control, were associated with mortality from all causes after the results had been adjusted to account for “self-rated health, treatment for hypertension, diabetes, asthma, arthritis, depression, or anxiety, and several sociodemographic and lifestyle factors (including smoking, deprivation, and body-mass index)”. Five out of six said they were generally happy with one in six generally unhappy.

The women who were unhappy were 29 percent more likely to die over the 10-year period, compared with the women who were happy most of the time. Instead, our self-reported levels of happiness may be a byproduct of our overall health status.

A study of nearly three-quarters of a million middle-aged women in the United Kingdom has debunked a popular myth that unhappiness and stress can lead to an early grave. “There’s a pathetic old joke, where the question is ‘What’s the most unsafe place in the world to be?’ and the answer is ‘Bed, look at the number of people who die in bed.’ Well, that’s just a pathetic old joke, but that’s reverse causality”.

Therefore, the investigators concluded that unhappiness itself was not associated with increased mortality among the unhappy contingent of women. Unhappiness won’t kill you.

In an accompanying commentary, a pair of scientists in France suggested that the results might not be the same in men, since “men and women probably define happiness differently”.