Can Happiness Make You Healthier? | Hacker News Reader

Can Happiness Make You Healthier?

harvardmagazine.com

84 pointslc123439 comments

Uh, isn't there a pretty well-established link between negative self-image / negative feelings and potentially self-destructive / self-harm type behaviors?

I guess my thinking about this conundrum is that anything regarding "happiness" or "health" - in my opinion - comes down to an issue of sustainability. Sure, I can be happy on the day I get some good news, but will I be happy on the day where I have to sit through frustrating traffic and getting cut off by every asshole leasing a Land Rover and going to work about the same time as me? Hm, I mean, I can try, but it's not like I can reach into the glove box, grab a carrot stick, chomp away and suddenly feel like I've just gotten out of having a nice swim off the coast of Cabo San Lucas.

As a species I do think studies considering what makes us "happy" and "healthy" and how we can treat "depression" or other "disabilities" of various degrees are worthwhile. But, when I see goals like this:

>Other studies will aim to establish best practices for corporate wellness programs by testing their efficacy.

I just laugh, because we already know the combination of how to make people happier and healthier (don't over work them, provide time for exercise, provide guidance and resources to eat appropriate diet as fresh as feasable) but there's not a "study" yet that has convinced the working US corporate culture to change. Maybe Harvard can finally do it. Yay.

> Uh, isn't there a pretty well-established link between negative self-image / negative feelings and potentially self-destructive / self-harm type behaviors?

More than that. There's a pretty well-established link between long-term heavy stress and a huge number of health issues. Definitely heart problems, but IIRC also immune system health and strokes, and perhaps even cancer.

If you don't believe me, no, I don't have any documentation handy...

Interestingly it's probably not actually stress that is killing you, it's how you handle stress. There was a really popular TED talk about it-- people who were stressed but didn't view it as a bad thing were still fine health wise. It was people who were stressed and also believed that was a bad thing that suffered.

How to make stress your friend | Kelly McGonigal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcGyVTAoXEU

Stress can cause growth (like when you exercise) and stress can be toxic(like when you're burned out). The problem with the study referenced in the video is that the people who don't see stress as bad likely aren't experiencing any negative physiological effects so obviously wouldn't die at the same rate as those who hold the opposing belief and experienced the negative physiological effects traditionally correlated with stress.

That's not a "problem" with the study, that's the entire point. The entire point is that stress isn't the issue, it's perceiving stress to be a bad thing that is bad for your health.

It's not talking about "good stress" or "bad stress".

How about flip the cause<—>effect:

People that suffer when stressed, feel bad about stress.

I can be suffering from stress but not feel bad about it though. That's the point of the study/talk.

I view the feeling of stress as not a bad thing, but as my body trying to give me more resources to overcome my situation. If I'm feeling stressed, my heart might pound and I might breathe faster-- but that's getting more oxygen to my brain.

>heart problems, but IIRC also immune system health and strokes, and perhaps even cancer.

^ The leading causes of death in the US.

Maybe if we didn't work so hard, we would be happier and healthier, which would in turn would create a positive feedback loop because we then wouldn't have to pay so much for medical insurance?

Such health problems can definitely stress one out.

Is this comment meant to be serious?

Usually, the health problems start some time after the stress. So unless stress is able to travel in time, it is more likely to be a cause than a consequence.

Why can't it be both?

Stress can cause illness and disease. Illness and disease can cause stress.

It could very easily be a feedback loop though

There is a connection between being happy and living a healthy life. We can take a look at so many examples where happiness and being positive changes the prospective of how you feel. For example, when you are going to a week long vacation you feel so happy, all your work related stress is gone. Even after miles of hiking you will get tired but not stressed out. But the same thing hits you hard Sunday night thinking about going to work Monday morning.

Sometimes it is hard for science to prove things but there is a clear evidence.

A long time ago my wife and I just simply swapped monday and sunday. For us mondays were crappy simply because others seem to wind themselves up the entire weekend only to leave for work monday morning ready to stress everyone around them out. It seems quite a common thing. I'm hard to stress out these days, but people who were easily stressed before benefited massively from just 'not doing' mondays.

When I am happy my body is much more resilient to getting sick and injuries. It just seems that everything is working better and I feel stronger. When I am depressed my joints hurt and exercise is much harder.

I strongly believe there is a feedback loop. Being healthy makes you happy and happiness makes you healthier.

I'm doubtful its really quite as simple as that. This is really only an anecdote, but a pattern I've noticed while leading mountain climbing trips is that feeling good [1] is strongly connected with people's ability to feel safe, ignore their own aches and pains, take risks, and look out for the welfare of the team; while feeling bad is strongly connected with fatigue, risk-aversion, and an inability to think about anything beyond your own immediate needs.

I'm not sure about any particular cause and effect here, but my experience suggests to me that there is a strong psychological effect here[2] where feeling good or bad has significant effect on the perception of your own well-being.

[1] I don't want to use the term happiness as it is too vague.

[2] Which may be physiological too, like low glucose levels leading to an altered psychological state.

I also made this theory that for an adult, pain is unnecessary and a sign of instability; while for a kid it's a sign of new information and learning stimulus. A lot of time kids will be a lot more oblivious to short and medium pain than an adult (of course, too high and they cry). The gist of it is that we process nociception differently depending on mood, age, perspective.

Similarly an unknown source of pain develop and increase over time, while if it's for a known and potentially positive future benefit it will just stay tagged as a temporary information.

Some say it's also partly a difference of sensitivity to signals. Anxiety will focus minds toward internal nocive signals. Meditation and mental tricks can hint at this. Also hormonal rebalancing can switch your mind to impossible painful mental and physical burden to a mild warm and peaceful state.

Very true. When you are happy and focused a lot of pain doesn't bother you.

I'm certainly no expert on happiness. I feel like i'm always ice skating on a highwire. But I think one important thing to do is, when things are good, don't be afraid to admit, out loud, that things are good.

I think being on edge and always waiting for the other shoe to fall hampers the enjoyment of the high. For most of us, life is crests and valleys, but while in the valleys, we are used to saying "Oh my god, this is so bad" instead of "Only way to go from here is up!", I notice that in the crests, people tend to not say "Man, things are really GREAT right now!"

I try to make it a habit to point this out fairly often.

Not sure if happiness can make you healthier but good health can definitely make you happier.

A better word than "happiness" should be satisfaction. Happiness can be for me instant joy or a good cup of hot chocolate. Satisfaction is more long-term and being satisfied with what you what, instead of joining the rat race.

And satisfaction is obviously linked to health outcomes.

Sometimes definitely wonder how many people read the article.

the article actually starts: IN THE QUEST to study human happiness, including its causes and effects, even agreeing on a definition is a formidable undertaking. Joy, euphoria, contentment, satisfaction—each of these, at times, has been used as a proxy or emphasized in research studies.

So i mean, they basically get that idea out of the way in the first paragraph.

In some interviews with the Dali Lama he has worded this difference as "short term pleasure versus long term happiness".

We have a lot of junk food snacks at the office, when I'm tired or stressed I eat them, when I'm rested and not stressed I can easily stay away.

This type of situation seems to exist in many different ways in my life, so its easy to see how I'd be healthier if I was happier.

Happiness is fleeting. Content-ness is what feels most de-stressing to me. Perhaps we can call it fulfillment.

I find that I experience more flashes of happiness when I am most content; and I get there by removing stressors and handling the "small things" in life that have a tendency to pile up.

Overall, I think we as a society focus too much on money, love, and happiness. Each feel better as a byproduct of effort rather than the goal. For example, some of the healthier businesses I've seen started were created with the passion for helping people more than profiting from them.

There is also a beautiful course on EdX "The science of happiness" where they show beneficial impact of happiness on health. https://courses.edx.org/courses/course-v1:BerkeleyX+GG101x+3...

without reading this article I bet blood pressure is mentioned. I have always been told that basically being happy leads to lower blood pressure which is certainly a good thing.

I conjecture that unhappy people are continually inhibiting certain ideas. This consumes attentional bandwidth which otherwise would go into managing/healing the body.

My casual, general reasoning is that more happiness approximates less stress, which means less health problems in general.

They're correlated, so, definitely yes?

I think it's the other way around: being unhappy makes you unhealthy.

The two ideas are hardly mutually exclusive.

Unhappy/stressed => worse health than baseline

Moderate level of contentment/stress => baseline

Happy/unstressed => better health than baseline

The questions are: is that the correct order of implications and does happiness produce better than baseline health.

Or maybe being unhealthy makes you unhappy.

Happiness is bad for business. Happy and self-reliant people are bad performing consumers. Especially for pharma and political products. You will soon see that happiness will be legally prohibited everywhere.

If laugh-loud is one measure of happiness, then I found most loud-laugher tend to be a bit on the heavier side.

It's said when you're upset, you're basically generating toxic cells inside your body.

yes I believe happiness leads to health, except for frequent-loud-laughs.

Probably. But karma is a bitch. Meaning your happiness of today is a bomb truck full of bad things set to explode in your face tomorrow. So I think its wise not to enjoy anything too much.

This is a misinterpretation of the concept of karma.

That is one bleak outlook on life.

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