The Anti-Aging Effects of Happiness
The idea that “happiness is good for you” might sound like a truism, but it raises some complicated questions. It’s not necessarily the case that happiness has to be good for your health; it could simply be a pleasant feeling with no other significant impact. Why should smiling translate into a stronger immune system or longer life?
To understand whether a good mood generally enhances physical health over the years, you need to find scientific experiments that connect concrete happiness outcomes to concrete health outcomes. Neither is particularly straightforward to measure, so compelling research on this topic is pretty scarce. But since 2020, efforts have started to pick up. I’ll focus on two specific questions here:
- Is happiness associated with less age-related memory decline?
- Can actively boosting happiness improve health outcomes?
Happiness is linked to slower memory decline
In a study published in 2020, Emily Hittner and her academic colleagues analyzed data from an 18-year longitudinal study that started in the mid-1990s and ended in the mid-2010s (most participants in the study…
