Happiness is Good for your Health

“The most important thing is to enjoy your life—to be happy”

– Audrey Hepburn

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Enjoy your life – be happy. That makes sense. And now research shows another compelling reason to be happy. In a recent article from Greater Good, the concept that happiness is good for your health is explored.

Recently, a critical mass of research has provided what might be the most basic and irrefutable argument in favor of happiness: Happiness and good health go hand-in-hand. Indeed, scientific studies have been finding that happiness can make our hearts healthier, our immune systems stronger, and our lives longer.

The research shows that happiness is good for your health in six ways:

1. Happiness protects your heart – happiness predicts lower heart rate and blood pressure.

2. Happiness strengthens your immune system – immune system activity in the same individual goes up and down depending on their happiness.

3. Happiness combats stress – happiness seems to temper the effects of stress, or at least help us recover more quickly.

4. Happy people have fewer aches and pains – positive emotion mitigates pain.

5. Happiness combats disease and disability – participants who reported being happy and satisfied with life most of the time were less likely to have long-term health conditions.

6. Happiness lengthens our lives – happier people were 35 percent less likely to die over the course of a recent study than their unhappier counterparts.

Happiness helps you live longer, combats disease, mitigates pain, combats stress, improves your immune system and protects your heart!  Don’t take my word for it, read about the this critical mass of research on Greater Good.

I’d like to close with a clip I have used in a past post.

Dan Gilbert explaining the The Surprising Science of Happiness.

Please let me know what you thought of Daniel Gilbert’s TED talk, and I’d love to hear your thoughts happiness and your health.

And as always thank you for taking the time to visit, I appreciate it.