Psychology Today: Does Feeling Happy Cause You to Feel Healthy, Too?

"There is a lot of evidence that happiness and health are linked. In general, people who are happy are also healthier than those who are not happy.

Research on health and happiness

To explore some kind of causal relationship between health and happiness, it is important to find a way to manipulate people’s happiness so that it can be studied experimentally. That approach is the one taken in a paper in a 2020 issue of Psychological Science by Kostadin Kushlev, Samantha Heintzelman, Lesley Lutes, Derrick Wirtz, Jacqueline Kanippayoor, Damian Leitner, and Ed Diener.

These researchers tested a group of 155 adults. Half were given a 12-week positive psychology intervention that taught a variety of techniques that help improve people’s happiness including mindfulness meditation, gratitude, and developing better social relationships. The other half were in a wait-list control in which they were told they would be getting the happiness intervention later, but did all of the measures at the same time as the individuals who went through the training.

During the training, the researchers measured people’s judgments of happiness as well as measures of how healthy they were feeling. They also took some measures of physical health including blood pressure and body mass index (BMI). These subjective and objective measures of health were also taken three months after the positive psychology intervention was completed.

Results

The intervention worked as expected. By the end of the program, the happiness of the people who went through the intervention increased significantly, but the happiness of the people in the wait-list control did not change substantially.

Interestingly, the positive psychology intervention did not influence any of the measures of physical health. That is, blood pressure and BMI did not differ between the groups.

This pattern of results suggests that (at least over a six-month period) instilling a higher level of happiness causes people to 'feel' healthier and to experience less feeling of sickness compared to people who did not go through an intervention aimed to increase happiness.

What is less clear from these findings is exactly how increases in happiness change the experience of health. At least over this time period, happiness does not change basic objective markers of health. It might just make people feel better so that they do not experience feelings of sickness."

Read the full article here!

Reflection:

Do you feel healthier when you're happier?

#Happiness #Health #Research