The Feel-Good Factor

Why do you want to be happy? Because you might live longer if you do.

- Nawaf Rahman

Are you happy? It’s a question we have been asked by others, and one we have asked ourselves. Okay, now I’ll ask you again in 10 minutes. Again an hour later. And then this evening, and most probably also tomorrow morning. The point being: we all know there are no easy answers, and this is why researchers have kept doing back to the drawing board to devise better methods for studying the link between happiness (or unhappiness), and what it does to our bodies. Some recent findings are pretty neat and we believe are taking us one step closer to answering that ultimate question: will I live longer if I am happier?

There is one study by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the United States that’s worth looking into. Instead of simply asking how a person felt at a particular time in the past, they asked people how they were feeling at regular intervals during a day. Five years later, the team assessed the life situations of the participants and what they found was pretty amazing, which is – the higher the level of happiness, the lower the death rate. Even though the study made clear that there might be other factors at play — such as demographic influences, health behaviour and history — the relationship still remained when the results were adjusted to take them into account.