Happiness And Health

Studies show that happy people — or, at least, people who self-identify as happy — are likely to live longer.  So, does that mean being happy is the key to living to a ripe old age?

Scientists now say . . . not so fast.  They found that although the happy people in the studied population of a million women were less likely to die during the ten-year study period than people who described themselves as unhappy, when researchers looked into the health of those groups they found that happy people also tended to be objectively healthier than the sad contingent — and healthier people by definition are likely to live longer.  In short, happiness might be correlated with longevity, but being happy, by itself, doesn’t cause long life. The study bluntly concluded:  “Our large prospective study shows no robust evidence that happiness itself reduces cardiac, cancer, or overall mortality.”

No surprise there, really.  Only the most ardent happiness advocate might think that the simple act of being happy could, say, prevent the formation and spread of cancerous cells in your body or allow you to escape a genetic predisposition to heart attack.  But that obvious conclusion still begs a significant question — why does the correlation exist in the first place?  Why do happy people tend to be healthier than unhappy people?

I think the answer is clear — and the key is not happiness, but the state of unhappiness.  If you are in pain or feeling sick or otherwise are suffering from poor health, it’s difficult to maintain a happy attitude.  On the flip side, if you’re down in the dumps, it’s harder to get motivated to do the things that help to keep you healthy, like getting a decent amount of exercise and watching your diet and your weight.  How many unhappy people overeat to compensate for their depression, for example, and end up dealing with obesity, the health problems associated with it, and the poor self-image issues that tend to accompany it?

Happiness therefore might not be the cause of good health, but unhappiness and poor health seem to be part of a cycle, with one reinforcing and contributing to the other.  Happiness therefore might not be the cause of a long life, strictly speaking, but if you can develop and keep a positive attitude it sure seems to help.

Unlocking The Aging Secrets Of Lazarus Long

What makes some people so long-lived?  In the classic science fiction story Methuselah’s Children, Robert A. Heinlein postulated that extreme longevity could be achieved by genetics.  Encourage long-lived families to mate with each other, and in a few generations you would produce the ageless Lazarus Long, who lived well past the age of 200.

Now researchers, too, are looking at the genetics of longevity.  Recently maps of the genomes of two 114-year-olds — 114 years! — were published, and scientists are examining the data, trying to figure out what has made the two so amazingly long-lived.  So far, the answer is:  who knows?  The supercentenarians don’t seem to have different genetic structures, or genes that perform different functions.  Yet, somehow, they have lived far longer than the average person.

Obviously, there is an environmental component of extreme age.  If you live in a war zone, or a disease-ridden area, you are less likely to live a long life. As time passes, however, genetics plays an increasingly significant role.  The super-old don’t experience dementia.  They don’t have problems with cardiovascular disease, or Parkinson’s disease.  They’ve managed to avoid other diseases and conditions that routinely fell individuals who make it past 80, too.  But what is it that they have that others don’t?

Figuring out whether there is a genetic key that allows people to live longer is likely to be a focus of medical research in the future.  If drug companies will spend billions developing allergy medication and sexual performance drugs, what would they spend to discover a drug that approximates the effect of special genetic conditions of supercentenarians and allows humans with “average” genes to live super-long lives?

In the meantime, the rest of us will just hope that we inherited the genetic secrets of our most long-lived ancestor.