UK Study Suggests Unhappiness Or Even Stress Won’t Kill You

UK Study Suggests Unhappiness Or Even Stress Won’t Kill You - A noteworthy scientific article published in the U.K. suggests that happiness doesn’t bring good health, and unhappiness, or even stress, has no direct link to mortality.

In 2005, a study revealed that “unhappy marriage is bad for your health.” In a nutshell, the scientific article published in the journal General Psychiatry suggests that unhappy couples may experience higher stress levels, and it could increase the risk of depression and even heart disease.

But new findings published in the UK say that unhappiness and even stress have no direct link to early death in women. This study was first reported by the New York Times on December 9th.

In a press release, researchers from the United Kingdom and Australia say life-threatening poor health can trigger unhappiness, or stress in some cases, and for this reason, some studies have linked the feeling of “not being happy” to increased mortality. 

Lead author Dr Bette Liu says illness makes you unhappy, but she quickly points out that “unhappiness itself doesn’t make you ill.”

Meanwhile, University of Oxford professor and co-author of the research, Sir Richard Peto, adds that many still believe the link between stress and happiness to mortality, but “they are simply confusing cause and effect.”

After examining the UK Million Women Study, a ten-year study of a million women, Dr. Liu claims their group has found no direct link between stress or unhappiness and mortality.

The main analyses included some 700,000 women with average age of 59 years.

Participants answered questionnaires every three to five years, asking them to self-rate their happiness, stress, or whether they felt relaxed, and even their own health including disorders. 

One in six said they were generally unhappy.

Researchers also monitored hospital records and death records of the participants, and over the course of the research, about 30,000 of women died (or approximately four percent of the total number of participants).

After allowing for any differences already present in lifestyle and health, researchers say the overall death rate among those who were considered unhappy was the same as the death rate among those who were “generally happy.”

Authors say the UK Million Women Study is so large that “it rules out unhappiness being a direct cause of any material increase in overall mortality, in women.”

This was true for overall mortality, for cancer mortality, heart disease mortality, as well as for stress and unhappiness.

It’s worth noting that in addition to finding out about illnesses, there are other factors that can lead to unhappiness, like for instance, worrying about something, or holding grudges. Source: StGist

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