Happy women do not live longer than those who are unhappy

Women who live happy lives are no longer thought to live longer than those who are unhappy, a study published in The Lancet has revealed.

The study of more than one million UK women, showed that happiness has no direct impact on mortality rates, and that the widespread belief that unhappiness and stress can lead to ill health and an early death had confused cause and effect.

Though life-threatening poor health can cause unhappiness and therefore is associated with increased mortality, and those who smoke are often unhappier than those who don’t, when considering other previous health conditions, lifestyle and socio-economic factors, investigators found that unhappiness alone was not associated with increased mortality.

Lead author of the study, Dr Bette Liu, is now located at the University of New South Wales, Australia. She 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 ten-year study of a million women.”

The research forms part of the UK Million Women Study. Those who participated were sent a questionnaire three years after they joined the study, asking them to rate their health, happiness, stress, feelings of control and whether they felt relaxed. Of those surveyed, five out of six said they were happy, while the remaining one person said they were unhappy.

The Million Women Study studied women who were recruited to take part between 1996 and 2001, who were then followed electronically for cause-specific mortality. Researchers studied 700,000 women with the average age of 59 over a 10 year period, during this time 30,000 women in the study died.

Similarly, in other studies, unhappiness has been associated with deprivation, smoking, not living with a partner or living alone and lack of exercise. The study found the strongest links between women who already had poor health, tended to reveal they felt stressed, unhappy, not relaxed or in control.

Researchers allowed for existing differences present in the health and lifestyle of the women who participated and found that the death rate among those who were happy, was the same as those who were unhappy.

Furthermore, due to the size of the study, researchers were able to rule out unhappiness as a direct cause of an increase in mortality in women. They also found this was true for overall mortality, including: cancer mortality, heart disease mortality and stress, in addition to unhappiness.

Co-author of the study, Professor Sir Richard Peto, from the University of Oxford, said: “Many still believe that stress or unhappiness can directly cause disease, but they are simply confusing cause and effect.

“Of course people who are ill tend to be unhappier than those who are well, but the UK Million Women Study shows that happiness and unhappiness do not themselves have any direct effect on death rates.”

Similar studies have previously associated reduced mortality with happiness, being in control and feeling relaxed, without taking into account the impact of ill health on stress and unhappiness.

Dr Philipe de Souto Barreto and Professor Yves Rolland from the Institute of Ageing at the University Hospital of Toulouse, France said the study provided ‘valuable and robust information’ about happiness. They called for further randomised trials to investigate further and said: “Such studies should be powered to allow comparisons to be made across age ranges and between men and women.”