Happy and healthy. Most people think the two go together, but apparently it’s not so.
The New York Times reports on a new study in The Lancet, which shows that happiness doesn’t equate to good health.
Being happy doesn’t make you live longer, either, prompting The Times to declare: ‘This is good news for the grumpy.’
“Happiness and related measures of well-being do not appear to have any direct effect on mortality,” the report says.
Researcher Sir Richard Peto, of the University of Oxford, decided to research the link between happiness and good health ‘because there is a widespread belief that stress and unhappiness cause disease.’
“Believing things that aren’t true isn’t a good idea,” Professor Peto said, adding: “There are enough scare stories about health.”
The researchers relied on the Million Women Study, which recruited women ages 50 to 69 from 1996 to 2001.
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