Researchers from Romania and Pakistan analyzed data from 123 countries over 16 years and found a specific level of happiness above which people begin to die less often from chronic diseases.
It sounds almost like a formula from a school textbook: if a country’s average happiness level is above 2.7 points on the Life Ladder scale, on which people rate their own lives from 0 to 10, then mortality from noncommunicable diseases among people aged 30 to 70 begins to fall noticeably. Anything above that is a boost to life expectancy. And for every additional “happiness point,” mortality drops by 0.43%.
This does not only work in developed countries. Even where incomes are more modest, the effect remains. But only if the happiness indicator stays consistently above the threshold. On average across all the countries in the study, happiness stood at 5.45 points. The minimum was 2.18, the maximum was almost 8.
None of this removes the influence of classic factors — such as excess weight, air pollution and the like. But it turns out that life satisfaction is another important pillar of public health. Governments now have a new unit of measurement — the national happiness index. And if health depends on happiness, perhaps it should be included among national priorities, alongside security, the economy and the football championship?
