A Smile a Day Keeps the Doctor Away?
If you keep upbeat, do you really live longer?
A new study by the University of Pittsburgh offers a tantalizing hint. After looking at a population sample of women aged 50 and over, researchers have concluded that there is some kind of link between people with cheery attitudes, and those with higher longevity and resistance to diseases and health disorders.
Okay. Perhaps you’d now like to join one of two queues that are busily forming. The first is the “Well, Duh” queue, occupied by everyone who takes a wry view of scientific findings that confirm what’s widely held as “common sense”. The second is the “Science, What Science?” line. This is where you’ll hear: “how exactly can something as woolly as a positive outlook actually improve your physical health?”
Team leader Dr. Hilary Tindle doesn’t know either – and she points out that this research doesn’t claim that you can grin your way to a ripe old age. (It may well be that simple, but we still don’t know). Yet these findings are weighty. The sample? A whopping 100,000 women. Of these, the proportion demonstrating an optimistic approach were significantly more likely to dodge ailments and death than their more pessimistic counterparts – a 14% better chance of being alive 8 years after the study began, and an impressive 30% lower likelihood of suffering heart disease during that time.
It’s true that these figures are based on subjective category assignments – a certain amount of informed pigeonholing by the research team – but it’s clear there’s something going on here. And while I’m waiting to find out what it is, I’ll be making sure I have a smile on my face.
Recommended Reading: Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project
Image: milena mihaylova
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5 Comments
March 6th, 2009 at 1:36 pm
Ahhh…watching Western medicine and science catch up to the ancient knowledge of the East is like watching a 3-year old kid in the sandbox proclaim that they know it all.
Yes, mood and attitude does connect to physical health. Why? Because we are made up of more than just our physical body. We also have mental and emotional bodies. When there are imbalances and blockages in these bodies, they eventually manifest in the physical plane.
Just because Western science can’t quantify it, doesn’t mean it’s not real. Reality is so much bigger than we can imagine.
March 6th, 2009 at 2:06 pm
Sarah, I do have to pipe up and say I feel your comment’s treading a little on the chauvinist side. I’d like to humbly point out that that three-year-old kid gave us the theory of evolution, string theory, chemistry, biology and genomics.
As a general observation, it seems that often people snicker at “obvious” conclusions of seemingly silly studies, because they are ignorant in their understanding of the definition of science. The whole point of science is that it seeks to provide falsifiable, evidence-based objective understanding of the world we live in. That’s something to laud. Just because it’s not “all the way there” yet doesn’t mean it should be seen as puerile. Life is pretty cool thanks to science. Yes, we have a lot more to learn, and invent, and resolve, but I’d take living in the era of Western science over the years that came before it any day.
P.S. I do deeply admire Eastern medicine and philosophy and I’m not saying there aren’t many valuable applications and ideas, but I get tired of people taking Western science so for granted. For anyone who thinks science isn’t so hot, I’d ask them to first define it.
March 6th, 2009 at 3:39 pm
I’m smiling reading all of this.
March 6th, 2009 at 4:52 pm
I haven’t stopped grinning since I wrote this post. It’s starting to hurt.But I’m *convinced* I’m now going to live until I’m 100 years old.
Sarah: Actually, I’d say Western Science is all about acknowledging what it doesn’t know. There are even modern theories (chaos theory, quantum mechanics, etc.) that state that some things are completely *un*knowable. Scientists of 100 years ago would have regarded these theories as mystical bunkum, but now they’re widely accepted and fit the evidence (eg. you see a confirmation of the working weirdness of quantum physics every time you turn your CD-player on. Lasers use ‘quantum tunnelling’, which is a principle we can see happening in experiments, but which is completely counter-intuitive to the way we’ve been taught to think. We can’t imagine it properly. But it’s going on, nevertheless, in front of us).
Regarding the study: studies like these have value because they try to fit the evidence to a scientific theory. They’re not being exclusive. In this case, the study isn’t debunking the philosophy that a happier attitude positively affects your health. In fact, it seems to support the link.
Also, in many cases, science works alongside existing traditional philosophies. In some cases, it’s another way of explaining the same thing that’s happening. A complementary perspective.
March 6th, 2009 at 8:07 pm
Ok ok, I’m just smiling too. It’s all good.
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