“Three things in life – your health, your mission, and the people you love. That’s it.” ~Naval Ravikant
Do you have to be happy to be healthy? Do you need to be healthy to be happy? Does being happy make you healthy, or vice versa? A new study finds that your physical health and your happiness might just be connected. What do you think?
A new paper published in the Psychological Science journal describes that health and happiness are dependent on one another. Moreover, both online and face-to-face psychological interventions can boost happiness and support physical health.
The pursuit of happiness and a healthy lifestyle are life goals desired by many. Are they two separate goals or is there a connection? Although people have different reasons or triggers for happiness , a general definition is the feeling associated with positivity, pleasure, and contentment.
‘Though prior studies have shown that happier people tend to have better cardiovascular health and immune-system responses than their less happy counterparts,’ said Professor Kostadin Kushlev from Georgetown University’s Department of Psychology, ‘our research is one of the first randomized controlled trials to suggest that increasing the psychological well-being even of generally healthy adults can have benefits to their physical health.’
At the end of the ENHANCE program, the participants did an evaluation on which modules had an effect on their long-term happiness and well-being. Three months later, their health and happiness were evaluated again.
Compared to the control participants who did not participate in the program, the ENHANCE participants had fewer sick days during the experiment. The program participants were also reported to have increasing levels of subjective well-being.
Moreover, the online platform was effectively equal to in-person sessions with trained clinicians. ‘These results speak to the potential of such interventions to be scaled in ways that reach more people in environments such as college campuses to help increase happiness and promote better mental health among students,’ Kushlev said.
