It is plausible that certain moods or mental states affect your physical health. For example, too much anger or hatred may lead to worsening health, heart disease, and even cancer. Some associate these terminal diseases to an unhappy, flat life. Some also bash the concept.
However, it turns out that how your “heart” actually affects your biological heart! A study revealed that optimistic people tended to live long lives and their hearts were proven to beat more soundly than pessimists.
Entitled “Association of Optimism with Cardiovascular Events and All-Cause Mortality” later published in JAMA Network Open journal, the study involved 15 previous studies with more than 229,000 participants.
From these studies, ten studies dealt with cardiovascular mortality and nine with all-cause mortality. Not only physiology but the study also monitored the behavioral and psychological state of those participants for two to 40 years.
At the end of the study, the researcher tabulated that optimism, turned out, affect one’s health. Not only for cardiovascular events but also for all-cause mortality. In other words, optimism decreases the risk of cardiovascular disease and other causes of mortality.
One of the studies pointed out that most studies about heart disease often correlated with depression and the pessimistic personality of human nature. But, optimism was left out.
When being analyzed, there are two kinds of optimism: explanatory and dispositional. Explanatory optimism believes that no one should be at fault for bad occurrences. While dispositional optimism believes that good things will happen in the future. Both have their own benefits; for example, explanatory optimism prevails against cardiovascular disease and dispositional optimism works better for cancer survival.
In conclusion, optimism is a trait that one should possess to not only have a happy life but also healthy life. We did not say that the pessimists would die sooner than the optimists. However, while the chance for the optimists to live longer is by far better than pessimists, didn’t the studies prove that one should live with hope and belief rather than grief and despair?
