Happiness apparently has nothing to do with how long you'll live

Grouches, rejoice — happiness appears to have nothing to do with your longevity, according to a long-term study of nearly 720,000 middle-aged women recently published in the Lancet. Researchers asked participants to rate their happiness and answer questions about their health and lifestyle, such as how much they smoked, their relationship status, and their levels of stress. While women's happiness initially seemed to be linked to their mortality rates — women who were happy lived longer — once the researchers had adjusted for health factors, they found that there was no statistically significant difference between the happy and unhappy women.

"Happiness apparently has nothing to do with how long you'll live," study author Bette Liu told Time.

But happy people can hold on to this, at least: It's actually pretty difficult to truly understand the effects of happiness, in part because people have different ideas of what happiness is, means, and feels like. The researchers only used one question to gauge the happiness of the participants, so there is still a chance it could play a part in various factors involving health and stress.

But for now, it looks like peppy people don't actually live longer than anyone else; unhappy people could very well be unhappy because their health is poor. "Being happier in itself doesn't make you live longer," Liu said. "It's the poor health of those individuals who are unhappy that actually explains why they might have higher death rates."