Be unhappy. Live long

As part of a large-scale multi-year study, the Million Women Study debunked the myth that happy people live longer than unhappy. Statistics show that there is no statistically significant difference in the life expectancy of happy and unhappy people.

For the study, we used the 700,000th base of British women Million Women Study, who voluntarily agreed to give information about their mental state (for some reason, they did not conduct such a study for men).

A previous analysis of the same base used to give the opposite result: that happy people live longer, a popular myth came from there. But now experts have done one simple thing: they normalized the sample taking into account the health of the respondents. And everything fell into place.

The fact is that human health directly affects happiness. It would seem a logical thing, but for some reason no one had guessed before that people were dying earlier not because they were unhappy, but because they had worse health than happy people. If a person is healthy and unhappy, then he will live as long as a happy healthy man.

The statistical analysis covered 719,671 women with a median average age of 59 years. Of these, 39% (282 619) reported an almost constant feeling of happiness, 44% (315 874) - "usually happy" and 17% (121 178) - unhappy. Within ten years, 4% (31 531) of the respondents died. A strong correlation was found between the subjective feeling of poor health and unhappiness. But after normalizing indicators of the subjective feeling of health, treatment for hypertension, diabetes, asthma, arthritis, depression and anxiety, as well as some socio-demographic and domestic factors (including smoking and body mass index), the feeling of unhappiness was no longer associated with mortality from all causes from coronary heart disease or cancer. A similar zero result was obtained for stress and lack of self-control, the authors of the study write.

The results of the scientific work were posted publicly on December 9, 2015,