Optimistic people live longer – now officially including women!
August 14, 2009 by Chris Duran
Filed under Articles, Blog, Healthy Living, Mental Attitude, Positivity
We talk loads about the importance of positivity and optimism for having a happy and successful life here at Cognicology.com. There is a lot of evidence that suggests that optimists are more successful in what they achieve – be it pursuits in business, relationships or family concerns. It turns out that there has been recent medical research that shows there is another very good reason to improve your levels of positive mental attitude – it can help you live longer.
Why the whole ‘now officially including women’?
Well, way back when in the early months of 2006, The Delfland Institute of Mental Health in The Netherlands released findings that optimistic men had a higher level of longevity due to less risk of suffering from heart attacks or other heart disease. This supported previous research suggesting that optimists tended to live longer. This new study however was the first to find a specific health link to optimism. The researchers suggest that people with higher levels of optimism then to be better at coping with difficult situations (hence less stress) and tended to take care of their bodies more (hence better cardiovascular fitness).
Since early this week however, it seems that women too fall into this category. On Monday, the BBC reported on a US-based study showed that optimism also decreases risk of heart disease and increases life span in women – mirroring the findings of the male-based Dutch study 3 years previous. This second study was based solely on females only for the same reason the first study was men-centric: single gender research is very common in medical research as it reduces complexity by decreasing possible variables in experimental design and interpretation.
I’m a pessimist – am I doomed?
No, you definitely are not. It turns out there are working and reliable methods out there for changing your attitude from a negative one to a positive one. There are a lot of resources out there to help you change your outlook, including professional blogs, books, etc.
In fact, one of the foremost experts on developing optimism and positive psychology is psychologist Martin Seligman. His book ‘Learned Optimism’ is a great resource for increasing the levels of optimism in your life. One great thing about this book is that it has a psych quiz you can take to uncover your current level of optimism – and then gives you very real and concrete strategies to improve your mindset.
Book Review:
Learned Optimism by Martin Seligman
Also, we have some articles on developing a positive mental attitude on Cognicology you may wish to read:
5 tips for developing a positive mental attitude
Creating positive thought habits
References:
And finally, you can find the links to the original BBC articles here, with a big thanks to Jane Rawson for letting us know about the BBC article from earlier this week!:
Optimists ‘have less heart risk’ – Dutch study on men, 2006 (BBC)
Optimistic women ‘live longer’ – US study on women, 2009 (BBC)
You are very welcome
I was pleased to see it myself as confirmation of something I’d long suspected too. I’ve always believed psychological factors have a huge impact on health, both on getting sick and getting better! For me, personally it was confirmed when I had glandular fever a few years back and lots of people were surprised at how easily I shook off the after-effects compared to other people’s experiences of being tired and washed out for months if not years. I just never thought it would take me that long to recover and it didn’t! I’m not saying that’s the only reason, of course it’s more complicated than that, but I do believe it had a sizable effect.