REAL LIFE NEWS: SEE, I TOLD YOU BEING MISERABLE WASN’T BAD FOR YOU AFTER ALL!
by Hazed
“I was happy in the haze of a drunken hour, But heaven knows I’m miserable now” sang Morrissey in the depressing hit by The Smiths*.
One of those things that everyone knows is that being unhappy is bad for your health. But new research shows that this time, received wisdom is wrong. There’s no proof at all that unhappiness leads to illness or death.
What there is, is a correlation between ill health and unhappiness. Being ill makes you unhappy – of course it does. And being ill leads to premature death, obviously. But it doesn’t seem to work in reverse: being unhappy doesn’t increase illness or death.
This news comes from the University of New South Wales in Australia, who studied a million women over a ten year period.
Co-author Prof Sir Richard Peto, of the University of Oxford, said: “The claim that this [unhappiness] is an important cause of mortality is just nonsense. Compare it with light smoking, where, if you smoke five to 10 a day, you are twice as likely to die in middle age.”
The only possible way that misery can affect your health is if it makes you eat too much, drink too much or harm yourself. But the blues on their own won’t kill you.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjPhzgxe3L0
Source: http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/dec/09/uk-million-women-happiness-study-not-live-longer
