Happiness and health, a straightforward correlation?

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Happiness as a metric is fairly hard to measure as different individuals have varying ways of defining it. However, you wouldn’t be far off suggesting that a happy person is a healthy one – would you?

Happiness has been singled out as a variable that determines how healthy your life is, let it be from a professional or personal level. Therefore you wouldn’t be remiss in assuming that someone living a healthy lifestyle would be happy, with the opposite also being true. That being said there are many variables that affect happiness, from internal factors such as fulfilment to external factors such as stress, there is a lot in play that help determine your happiness.

Continued stress doesn’t tend to lead to a healthy lifestyle. Although an emotion that is found around the animal kingdom as a way to deal with an external force or event, as times have developed, stress has taken on a whole new definition within our lives. Whether it be work, personal life or other issues nibbling at your subconscious, stress is now more commonly associated with a challenging situation.

Often times, people’s way to deal with stress can have compounding effects on their health, with many turning to quick-fix solutions such as alcohol, smoking, drugs or food. These will exacerbate certain health pitfalls already present from the ongoing anxiety and could serve as a negative feedback loop whereby sufferers continue to self-medicate at that level whenever they feel as though they are in a stressful situation.

People who suffer from sleeping disorders have also been recorded with lower levels of hormones and affect your own brain performance and physical ability – a good amount of sleep leads to a healthier mind and body. As aforementioned, compounding effects can then come into play, with lack of sleep and stress precursors to unhappiness, poor health and potential depression. The latter is obviously a serious ailment brought on by a chemical imbalance which then affects people’s behaviours, feelings and emotions.

Without delving too much into the consequences of those specific issues, this small sample size of problems shows that your happiness and health are indeed correlated. People who are happier will tend to exercise more, be more active socially and have positive outlooks. In itself, this behaviour helps maintain a proper level of mental and physical fitness that contributes to balanced hormonal levels and individual performance. A happy person is most definitely a healthy person.