Scientists says unhappiness doesn’t make people ill

A recent study made in United Kingdom and Australia revealed that unhappiness is not the reason for your health miseries.

A study published in the Lancet magazine, a UK medical journal on Wednesday founded that the unhappiness has no direct effect on the physical health. The study was conducted on 1 million middle aged women in Britain and Australia.

Lead author Dr. Bette Liu, of the University of New South Wales, Australia, said that illness makes a person unhappy but there is no evidence of vice versa.

“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” he said.

However, experts argued that unhappiness in childhood may still have a lasting impact.

A series of studies had shown that how happy people are, strongly predicts how long they are going to live. Ideas included detrimental changes in stress hormones or the immune system resulting in a higher risk of death.

But the research team in the UK and Australia said those studies failed to deal with reverse causality - namely, that people who are ill are not very happy

Study:

Participants in the Million Women Study were asked to regularly rate their health, happiness and levels of stress.

The 1 million women within the age group of 50 and 69 were asked how often they get happy, unhappy, stressed and relaxed and noted their health ailments increasing or decreasing rate like blood pressure, asthma, diabetes and so on.

The results showed that whether people were 'never', 'usually' or 'mostly' happy had no impact on their odds of dying during the duration of the study once other factors such as health or whether they smoked were taken into account.

The researchers are saying that the notions that are in the public that unhappiness cause diseases especially related to heart are wrong.

However, some other experts are condemning the study by saying that unhappiness definitely causes hormone imbalance, which is the major cause for the diseases.

They are also citing the example of Gastro esophageal reflux disease (GERD) which is completely caused by stress and unhappiness.

This study is also criticized based on the fact that only women were studied and we cannot know about the trend in men.