Illustration by Jeanine Murch
Thanks to Harvard Magazine for this one:
RIGHT NOW | BENEFITS OF BLISS
Can Happiness Make You Healthier?
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.
Studies that probe the link between happiness and health outcomes are still relatively rare in scientific work, but the new Lee Kum Sheung Center for Health and Happiness at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health aims to change that as it pursues a new approach to health maintenance: focusing on specific factors that promote the attainment and maintenance of high levels of well-being. In this, the center represents a sharp departure from traditional medicine that focuses on risk factors and treatments for disease. Among the center’s first goals: to catalog and standardize the measures used to describe and evaluate happiness and related factors. “There are more than 100 different measures already in use for the various forms of well-being,” says Laura Kubzansky, the Lee Kum Kee professor of social and behavioral health. “And it may be that the instrument we need for our research does not yet exist.” Happiness, after all, is a term that encompasses physical, emotional, and social factors. Although the different facets of well-being frequently occur together, measuring one does not always shed light on whether the others are present; thus, different measures may be needed to capture these distinctive facets.
The researchers also hope to solidify evidence that emotional health influences physical health, and not just the other way around. This notion was challenged last year, when The Lancet published a study finding no connection. But critics (including Kubzansky, who coauthored a letter of response in the same journal) took issue with the study’s methodology, noting that in adjusting for self-rated health (which is partly defined by emotional well-being), the study’s authors essentially adjusted for the very factor they were trying to investigate as a predictor.
The debate exemplifies the tension underlying research in this area: the public seems to find the subject enormously compelling, but some segments of the scientific community remain skeptical. Kubzansky and her colleagues aim to amass enough evidence of biological connections between emotional and physical health that eventually the link will be taken for granted, much as exercise is generally regarded as beneficial.
Yet even if that link is established, how can it be applied? If some people are innately happier than others, are the latter doomed to ill health? To answer such questions, the researchers seek to identify social policies that may be relevant as well as to test interventions with the potential to increase happiness: exercise, mindfulness, and cultivation of a positive mindset, for example. Other studies will aim to establish best practices for corporate wellness programs by testing their efficacy.
Read the whole article here.
Organikos 