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Happiness Could Add 10 Years to Your Life
In comparison, studies on people who were in good health do find a strong positive effect for happiness on health. Professor Veenhoven suggests that happiness may not have a beneficial effect on the physical health of those who are ill, but it does help prevent people falling ill in the first place.
A especially spectacular study on nuns observed that those who were happiest in early life lived 10 years longer than those who were unhappy. Another study of 660 inhabitants of Ohio observed that higher levels of happiness translated, on average, into 7.5 years more life.
How to be happyWhat happiness is and where it comes from are very personal, but there are some general principles starting to emerge from the area of positive psychology. Here are a few prior articles on happiness from PsyBlog:
- Why sustainable happiness is all about the day-to-day.
- What Confucius had to say about how to be happy.
- The dangers of materialism.
Here are the rest of my articles on the new science of happiness.
[Image credit: eef]Labels: Happiness