How happy people are strongly predicts how long they are going to live

According to the UK’s Million Women Study, being miserable or stressed will not increase your risk of dying.

A series of studies had shown that how happy people are, strongly predicts how long they are going to live.

Ideas included detrimental changes in stress hormones or the immune system resulting in a higher risk of death.

But the research team in the UK and Australia said those studies failed to deal with reverse causality – namely, that people who are ill are not very happy.

Participants were asked to regularly rate their happiness, health and levels of stress.

The results showed that whether people were “never”, “usually” or “mostly” happy had no impact on their odds of dying during the duration of the study once other factors such as health or whether they smoked were taken into account.

Dr Bette Liu, one of the researchers at the University of New South Wales in Australia, said: “Illness makes you unhappy, but unhappiness itself doesn’t make you ill.

“We found no direct effect of unhappiness or stress on mortality, even in a 10-year study of a million women.”

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