Happiness Read online

  There are several different physiological pathways leading from unhappiness to cardiovascular illness, and one of the most important involves chronic stress. Robert Sapolsky spent years studying the physiological aspects of stress in an unlikely place: the African bush. Sapolsky's research subjects were not college undergrads, but zebras, baboons, and other wild animals, which Sapolsky regularly darted with a tranquilizer gun and drew blood samples from. In his intriguing book Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, Sapolsky describes the typical zebra day as tedium punctuated by very anxious moments. One moment the zebra is hanging out with his buddies, eating grass, and gossiping about the wildebeest, and the next moment a ferocious lion is breaking up the party. The zebra reacts, physiologically speaking, like the rest of us might. His heart rate quickens, his system is flooded with adrenaline and cortisol, and he runs away. But, according to Sapolsky, an interesting thing happens once the zebra has reached safety: all of his physiological stress responses diminish and the zebra returns back to his normal business-as-usual attitude. Unfortunately, humans - because of their unique ability to predict the future and remember the past - are not always so resilient.

  People who experience stressful situations, especially intense ones, often have a difficult time adapting back to normal: that is, they continue to experience physiological distress even after the stressful or traumatic event has happened. The chronic nature of their stress slowly takes a serious toll on their health. Perhaps because of our large brains, we can readily carry with us the traumas of the past. We can also foresee more of the dangers of the future, and therefore we have a greater capacity for chronic stress. Or perhaps it is not how terribly smart we are, but just how complicated our lives have become that makes us susceptible to chronic stress.

  Stress elevates heart rate, which in turn puts people at greater risk of stroke and heart disease. In addition, extreme emotional events can serve to directly trigger heart attacks. Yet another way that happiness and unhappiness can influence heart disease is by lowering or raising a blood component called fibrinogen. We need fibrinogen because it is essential in blood clotting when we are injured. However, high fibrinogen levels predict heart disease, and happy people tend to have low levels. In one experiment, unhappy people produced twelve times as much fibrinogen as happy people in reaction to a stressor. High levels of fibrinogen in turn predicted greater rates of heart disease and stroke. Thus, there are many physiological reactions that provide a bridge from our happiness to our hearts. In the modern world, it seems that many people feel "stressed" much of the time. We might write this off as middle-class kvetching if it weren't for the serious health effects it causes.

  Recovering from Injuries

  Anyone who has bumped a knee, twisted an ankle, broken an arm, or cut a finger knows that the body will heal itself, but that it will take a while. New experimental evidence tells us that organisms recover more slowly from injuries if they are under stress. To examine our ability to physically recover when damage is done to our bodies, scientists create very small wounds - perhaps on your arm or the roof of your mouth - with a sterile puncture device. Not fun, but like having your fingertip pricked when doctors need a small blood sample. The researchers then can track how long the wound takes to heal, and relate that time to circumstances in the subjects' lives. Folks who are in the midst of a stressful event, such as taking care of a chronically sick child or a disabled spouse, have slower wound recovery. Students studying for midterm examinations, for instance, show slower recovery rates than do those who are preparing for a vacation. In highly controlled animal laboratory studies, mice exposed to stress also heal more slowly. Furthermore, if the mice are given a shot to block stress hormones, the mice heal as quickly as the unstressed mice, demonstrating that the bodily stress reactions are indeed the culprit in slow recovery. Thus, although we are all exposed to accidents and illnesses that damage our bodies innumerable times during our lifetimes, happy people tend to heal more quickly from these wounds of slings, arrows, and bicycle accidents.

  Growing Old Through Stress

  We all know the folk wisdom that says that hard or stressful lives make people age prematurely. Perhaps you even know somebody who has gone completely gray in the midst of a divorce or other difficult event. Most of us look at gray hairs and wrinkles as an indicator of quality of life, as well as a sign of aging. Does that darkhaired 60-year-old beauty dye her hair, or has she led a stress-free life? New research evidence indicates that the rate of bodily aging may indeed be related to stress, and that this occurs at the level of the genetic control of cell replication and replacement.

  People's bodies age more quickly if they are exposed to more chronic stress, possibly because they have less capacity to replace worn-out cells. In a recent study on English twins, scientists found that female fraternal twins who had a more stressful life compared to their sisters, as exemplified by the type of job they had, were seven years older in terms of their telomeres, the caps of DNA that protect the ends of our chromosomes. As we age, old cells die and are replaced by new ones. When cells divide to produce new cells, we lose a portion of our telomeres, and the length of our telomeres shortens as we age. When we lose our telomeres, we lose the ability to replicate new cells with fidelity, and our old cells age and eventually die. Telomeres allow our chromosomes to divide and replicate without losing genetic information. Shorter telomeres are associated with death at a younger age, with a greater risk of heart diseases, and with serious infections. We want the longest telomeres we can get, and begin to age mercilessly once we lose them. Thus, the finding that stress correlates with shorter telomeres is of critical importance.

  The scientists also found that it makes a difference whom the twins marry. The researchers identified pairs of twins where one had married an upper-class man and the other twin sister had married a lower-status man. In this case, the privileged twin was nine years younger than her twin in terms of telomere age! Besides the obvious lesson for our children to "marry up," the study strongly suggests that stressful and more arduous lives do make us age more quickly. Science has not yet found a way to protect our telomeres, and so we all lose them slowly as our cells replicate. But we don't want to lose our telomeres more quickly than necessary due to stress and unhappiness.

  The twin study suggests that stress leads to aging telomeres, and it is known that once telomeres get too small, cell senescence sets in. Other studies support the findings of the twin study with more direct evidence about stress. For example, it was found that among women with chronically ill children, the longer the child had been sick, the shorter the mothers' telomeres. The most stressed mothers had telomeres that were shorter by from nine to seventeen years when compared to the least stressed mothers! Obesity and smoking may also shorten our telomeres, and these conditions are often related to lower happiness as well.

  Although our understanding of telomere aging is uncertain and very incomplete, the results of these studies are impressive because they relate feelings of stress and objective conditions of stress to a genetic marker of aging. Stress appears to empower our universal enemy - aging.

  Unhappy Hormones

  Hormones are vital for health and proper functioning. There are a variety of hormones released in the body that help natural processes ranging from fertility, to sleep, to repairing damaged cells. Cortisol, for example, is a hormone that is released when we are under stress. Its role is to break down damaged tissue so that it can be replaced by new, healthy tissue. It is usually released when there is some type of trauma or stress. However, too much or too little of certain hormones can lead to disease. For instance, large amounts of circulating cortisol in the bloodstream - which could be the result of chronic stress - predict obesity, hypertension, and Type 2 diabetes. Chronic happiness is, fortunately, associated with lower levels of cortisol, as well as better regulation of cortisol through the day. Thus, hormones are yet another route by which our emotions can influence our health.

  Family and Friends
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  The final route from happiness to health is through social relationships. Diverse types of social support, from having loving parents to a strong marriage, are related to better health. In one study, for example, the best predictor of angina (the pains due to insufficient blood to the heart) in men was a question about how loving their wife was. Isolated individuals are more likely to smoke, be obese, and have high blood pressure. On the other hand, those with strong social ties are likely to survive longer after a heart attack. Because happiness and good social relationships are related (see chapter 3), the absence of loneliness is yet another reason that happy people tend to be healthier.

  A very important finding comes from Stephanie Brown and her colleagues at the University of Michigan: giving support to others is more important to longevity than receiving support. She found that elderly individuals who gave little emotional or practical support to others were more than twice as likely to die during the five years she followed them compared to people who gave to others. Even accounting for initial health and other factors, people who gave to a spouse, to friends, and to neighbors were blessed with greater longevity.

  We have described eight pathways leading from happiness to health and unhappiness to illness. Future research will refine our knowledge of these causes and explore how they interact. In the meantime, be happy.

  Optimal Happiness

  We learned earlier that happy people can fail to be vigilant enough in the face of life-threatening illness, but that generally happiness and optimism are good for health. A few studies indicate that highly aroused positive emotions may put us at risk. What about those occasional bouts of unhappiness? Do they also put us at risk? Don't be concerned if you experience sporadic anger, sadness, or worry. Happiness is not the total absence of negative emotions. Brief feelings of sadness and guilt, while unpleasant to experience, can serve important purposes and help us function effectively. How, then, on an individual basis, can we hope to gauge whether we are happy enough to benefit from the health effects of happiness?

  One way is by considering "affect balance," the sum total of our unpleasant moods subtracted from our pleasant emotions. Instead of ridding ourselves of all unpleasant emotions, our aim is to experience considerably more pleasant than unpleasant moods and emotions. Researchers examined affect balance in the lives of cardiovascular patients who had previously been hospitalized. They found that affect balance tending toward the negative - that is, with relatively frequent or intense negativity compared to the amount of positivity - was the best predictor of whether the patient relapsed and was readmitted to the hospital. Experiencing negative emotions was not nearly as important as whether a person experienced more negative emotions than positive ones. Using the affect balance approach to happiness, we need to make sure that we commonly experience good feelings, and only infrequently experience negative ones.

  A New Healthy Life Checklist

  If you want to have a healthy lifestyle and increase your odds of living longer, doctors typically recommend a series of health-promoting behaviors. Many doctors give you a health checklist for the start of your physical exam. Magazine articles and internet sites give formulas for predicting one's length of life from these items. So, to judge your health practices, and how long you can expect to live, please place an X next to the items below that are true:

  The first ten items are likely to increase your health and longevity. The next ten items are not only likely to help your health and longevity, but they also will make those extra years a lot more fun! Indeed, whereas a few of the first ten healthy lifestyle items sound like hard work, the last ten healthy lifestyle items make life more enjoyable.

  Conclusions

  Health is a part of psychological wealth because it provides the energy and ability to do the things needed to live a rewarding life. Of course, there are people with serious chronic illnesses and disabilities who lead full lives. However, these individuals are heroic, and normally ill health is an impediment to complete functioning. A major point of this chapter is that although health can influence feelings of wellbeing, the reverse is also true.

  When Ed was a teenager, he was hospitalized for a small surgical operation, and the nurse gave him the usual embarrassing "barn door" hospital gown to wear. He refused it, insisting that he would wear the crisply pressed shirts he had brought. No, the nurse countered, the hospital rules required that the gown be worn, and not crisply pressed shirts. Ed was unswayed. "Sorry," he replied, "no gowns." Exasperated with this difficult adolescent, the nurse stomped out of the room, unable to tolerate patients who did not comply with her commands. Was Ed just difficult? Probably. But there is another lesson here as well: Ed realized that he would feel more comfortable and happier about himself if he wore the shirts. He felt the shirts would help him to overcome the bleak surroundings of the old hospital. Little did he know that the snappy shirts might have helped him recover more quickly!

  The evidence for the effects of happiness on health and longevity is not watertight, and the future will undoubtedly see some minor revisions to our understanding of the health-happiness connection, but the proof is strong enough that you should act on it. The evidence that happy people are more likely to be physically healthier and live longer is becoming compelling; it is so strong that working on one's happiness is a worthwhile health strategy. Doctors once thought that unhappy people just moan and complain more about their health, and they do, but we now know that unhappiness can truly cause worse physical health, whereas happiness can cause objectively better health. Of course, happiness will not prevent all diseases, any more than quitting smoking, wearing seatbelts, or using sunscreen will. But in combination with these other factors, it can help. Not only is a happy person likely to live longer, but he or she is likely to be healthier and more fulfilled during those extra years. No doubt an entrepreneur will soon offer to test the length of your telomeres, and we might try this ourselves. But why not just keep them as long as possible in the first place, by being happy most of the time? We should all think of happiness, hope, and optimism as important health-protective factors. Suggest to your doctor that he or she add these items to the health checklist. And tell your doctor to read this book!

  4

  Happiness and Social

  Relationships: You Can't

  Do Without Them

  Imagine a perfect Saturday morning. You don't have to go in to work, you wake up feeling fresh and rested, and you look forward to a leisurely breakfast. However, when you flip on the kitchen lights, something on the table immediately catches your eye. It is a large stone tablet, engraved with strange runes! It reads:

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  At first you can't make heads or tails of the writing, and think the tablet must be some kind of prop or practical joke. Your family is still asleep, so you get a cup of coffee and a bowl of cereal. As you sit down to eat, you realize there is a pattern to the writing and, before long, you have deciphered the script, which reads:

  We are the Demonians from the Galaxy Andromeda and are conducting a study of your world. To determine more about your species, we have left you alone in the world, and have removed all other people. You will live out the rest of your life alone on your planet. We have powers far beyond those of your species, and you will find that we have accommodated your physical needs - there will always be heating and air conditioning, food, gasoline, and functional vehicles wherever you go in the world. Your safety from animals and other dangers is assured. We will not protect you from su
icide, however, so that as long as you choose to continue your life without killing yourself, it will signify to us that we have your informed consent for being a subject in this experiment. The entire planet is now yours and belongs to you alone. Our interest is in observing your behavior and, in particular, how you function without others of your species. You should feel free to enjoy your world in whatever way you desire, but you will do so alone. Thanks for participating in our study, and best of luck to you.

  Ha, ha, you think, this must be an elaborate practical joke concocted by your kids or your friends. But the more you consider it, the more you wonder exactly where your kids and friends are. The house is conspicuously quiet and there is no traffic out front. Feeling a slow surge of panic, you make some calls. No one answers at any of the numbers you dial. You decide to go for a drive. The streets are empty, the stores are deserted, and you don't see a single pedestrian. You begin what will become a weeklong search of nearby towns, desperate to locate another person.