A recent Gallup Poll, called the Healthways Well-Being Index, has rated Boulder, Colorado, the #1 healthiest and happiest city in the country. It was based on an analysis of 353,000 Americans in 2009. The interviewers asked individuals to assess their jobs, finances, physical health, emotional state and communities.
Having just visited my daughter, Grace Boyle, who lives in Boulder, I was not surprised. The restaurants are excellent, the town is surrounded by boulders, mountains, and forests with Boulder Creek flowing through the center of the town. Boulder is surrounded by a wonderful greenbelt with 120 miles of trails and there are 9 bookstores between 9th and 18th streets. Does reading books make us happier? I’m pretty happy when I spend time in bookstores!
I think the 300 days of sunshine per year in Boulder contributes to feeling happy. In Iowa, I think we have almost 300 days of gray skies. Okay, this isn’t official data but it seems true. I think the sunshine alone adds to their happiness level as I’ve written about in many posts about how 20 minutes/day of skin exposure to sunshine is needed to manufacture Vitamin D in our bodies.
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Happy and Healthy Heart
In 1995 researchers started following 1,739 healthy adults living in Nova Scotia, Canada, for 10 years to determine whether attitudes affected their health.
Known heart disease risk factors were calculated, and still researchers found that the happiest people were 22% less likely to develop heart disease over the 10 years of follow-up than people who were in the middle of the negative-positive emotion scale. This study involved 14,916 person-years of observation.
People with the most negative emotions had the highest risk for heart disease and people who scored highest for happiness had the lowest risk.
On a NONscientific note, when we’re happy, we tend to use expressions describing our heart–such as ‘my heart is full of love’, ‘I’m open-hearted’, or she’s a ‘big-hearted’ person, or my ‘heart is overflowing’. It makes sense to me that the heart is closely linked to happiness.
The researchers are theorizing that if they could make people happier (‘increase positive affect‘), they could decrease cardiac risk in a larger part of the population. My personal experience over 18 years of helping people to be happier, shows that when we decrease the number of limiting beliefs we live by, we are free of the pain they create in our lives. The result is that we feel happier …and often healthier.
Additional research is needed, to prove (not just to suggest) that heart disease prevention may be helped by experiencing positive feelings as well as reducing symptoms of depression. The findings also do not prove that happiness protects the heart. This will require rigorous clinical trials. I don’t usually wait for scientists to tell me what I already suspect is true! One way that happiness may protect the heart is because many happy people eat and sleep better.
Do you have a healthy heart because you have more positive emotions? What do you think?
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Marci Shimoff is the author of Happy for No Reason, co-author of six Chicken Soup for the Soul Books, and featured teacher on the movie The Secret.
I’ve mentioned before that Marci introduced me to my husband, Jay, 29 years ago. Even though he and Marci were friends, she didn’t know he was moving across the country to California. As fate would have it, he was moving to Santa Monica for a year. Jay and I became good friends, eventually started dating, and a year later we were married. So, even though Marci has inspired thousands of audiences around the world, I tell her that introducing us is her greatest success.
Anyway, whenever Marci and I get together, we talk about happiness, relationships, love, life and how it all fits together. This summer I interviewed her about her latest book that is chock full of happiness tips.
Please click here to listen to my interview with Marci.
Lenora's Italy Retreat blog | Lenora's Change Limiting Beliefs Website
BMJ.com, formerly the British Medical Journal, published an article a few days ago about the 20 year study of 4,700 people that shows that happiness is good for you and spreads like the flu. Happiness is more potent than making someone laugh because if one person is happy it increases the chance that others in the group can also be happy.
How are you staying happy these days?
Lenora's Italy Retreat blog | Lenora's Change Limiting Beliefs Website
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