Can Happiness Prevent Heart Attacks?
Seems like it can!
There are several causal mechanisms that suggest that happiness would lower ones risk for heart disease. The foremost reason would be that happy people are better able to adapt to life���s stresses. Stress, as we all know, is a big contributor to high blood sugar levels (via cortisol production) and high oxidative stress, both of which cause systemic inflammation which is the number one cause for heart disease (hope you are not one of those that still believes cholesterol is the cause).
I read this article on Bloomberg Business titled ���These are The Happiest Countries in the World��� where is lists 20 of the happiest countries in decreasing order from the happiest to the least happy. In the same article it also listed the 20 of the unhappiest countries in decreasing order from the unhappiest to the less unhappy. ��Here is the data from the article.
I pooled all 40 countries and arranged them in order of happiest to least happy in one scale. I then dug up world heart disease statistics by country from World Health Rankings��and plotted the death rate due to heart disease (per 100,000) for these same countries. Here is what I found (the graph below - click for full resolution).
It seems that in general death rate from heart disease goes up as the happiness index goes down for all the countries plotted (except for a few outliers). Now I know that correlation doesn���t imply causation but it���s interesting to note that people in the happiest countries also happen to have the lowest number of deaths from heart disease. Weather their happiness is the cause for their low death rate; I leave it up to the reader to judge.
���Being happy is synonymous to having a good good heart���- Leonora R Aquino
