Beat the Common Cold and Flu With Happiness
November 25 2006
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Happiness, along with other positive emotions, could be even more important to health than had been previously thought.
A recent study finds that those who are happy, lively, calm or otherwise generally exhibit positive emotions are less likely to become ill when they are exposed to a cold virus.
What's more, when happy people do catch a cold, they report fewer symptoms than might be expected.
Previous studies had reported similar results, but left open the possibility that the greater resistance to infections may not have been related to happiness per se, but to other characteristics often associated with happy people. But this latest study controls for those variables, and still found that those who report positive emotions are less likely to catch colds, regardless of such factors as age, race, gender or body mass index.