Health Is the Secret to Happiness

Your body, not your bank account, is the best source of emotional well-being.

Although we have traditionally pursued happiness through relationships and religion, status and substance use, money and material goods, arguably the most enduring and powerful contributor to our happiness is the quality of our physical health. The profound influence of health on our capacity for happiness is readily demonstrated in two ways: First, our state of health strongly affects how we feel. Energy, vitality, motivation, and resilience are just some of the many dimensions we characteristically describe as emotions that are often instead a manifestation of our physical health. While few would dispute that it is possible to experience happiness despite the malaise of medical illness, none can deny that it is more difficult.

Second, the quality of our physical health determines the boundaries of what we can do. Even under the best of circumstances, the feeling of happiness can be as capricious as the weather or stock market. Constrain our already fickle capacity for happiness even further with disease and disability that rob our ability to move in and modify the world around us, engage with and experience the people and preoccupations we care about, and happiness becomes as ephemeral as a rainbow.

Given the intimate connection between physical and mental health, coupled with research indicating that just 2.7% of American adults are now physically healthy—based on standards of not smoking, obtaining regular exercise, consuming a nutritious diet, and maintaining a recommended body-fat level based on DEXA scans (dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry; 1)—perhaps it is no wonder that happiness levels in the U.S. have been declining since the 1990s (2).

How health becomes happiness or its opposite

Source: Thomas Rutledge

Evolving metabolic research and behavioral neuroscience offer even more precise insights into how our physical health directly and indirectly regulates our emotional well-being. As summarized in the figure above, our lifestyle habits and underlying biology form a symbiotic relationship that is the foundation of both our physical and mental health. Like two sides of the same coin, behaviors and physiological processes operate as inseparable components of a recurring cycle across our lifespan.

Read the full available article on Psychology Today

Reflection: Do you belive that health is the secret to happiness? If so, how does one find happiness if one's health is compromised?

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