Feeling healthy tied to personal happiness

Self-rated health strongly and significantly affects happiness, even after controlling for income, employment, and education, reports a recent Iran study.

Researchers conducted a cross-sectional analysis of 19,499 adults (mean age 36.38 years, 9,845 men). The Oxford Happiness Questionnaire was used to assess happiness and returned a mean score of 4.1 out of 6, suggesting that, in general, participants felt rather happy/pretty happy.

A one-item question for self-rated health was also administered and showed that participants perceived themselves to have fair to good health, with a mean score of 3.66 points out of 5. Approximately a third (34.8 percent) of participants rated their health to be very good, while 6.9 percent said they had very poor health.

Logistic regression analysis found that adults who said that they had very poor health status were highly likely to report Oxford Happiness scores ranging from 1–3, suggesting overall unhappiness (odds ratio [OR], 5.11, 95 percent confidence interval [CI], 4.490–5.824; p<0.001).

The same was true for participants with poor or very poor income (OR, 1.553, 95 percent CI, 1.406–1.716; p<0.001), who were unemployed (OR, 1.704, 95 percent CI, 1.432–2.029; p<0.001), were older (OR, 1.190, 95 percent CI, 1.088–1.302; p<0.001), and with 10–12 years of education (OR, 1.271, 95 percent CI, 1.174–1.377; p<0.001).

“It seems that adopting policies to improve public health and placing health on the public agenda could be an effective approach for increasing happiness,” the researchers said.