THAT'S MEN:Don't put off having fun – for the good of your heart, writes PADRAIG O'MORAIN
WANT TO reduce your risk of heart disease? Then do more of the things that make you happy. That’s the message from new research in the US into the link between happiness and heart disease.
Happier people are less likely than others to suffer a heart attack or angina, the research found. And the leader of the study, Dr Karina Davidson, suggests that making sure you get some enjoyable activities into every day can help make you happier and healthier.
I have written before about a link between depression and heart disease, but this study takes the more positive approach of suggesting a link between happiness and heart health. I like this approach because very often cultivating health doesn’t look like a lot of fun – just think of the food pyramid.
Dr Davidson, whose study was published in the European Heart Journal, warns against “binge” fun. That’s putting enjoyable activities off until your holidays or, worse (much worse) retirement. She advocates doing it every day, whether that’s reading, listening to music, knocking a ball around the garden or playing with model aeroplanes.
In the study, she and her team examined more than 1,700 adults (half of them men) in Nova Scotia in 1995. Their risk of heart disease was assessed, as was their level of positive and negative emotions.
Ten years later they were assessed again. The results showed that people who were usually positive had a substantially lower risk of heart disease than their gloomier counterparts.
Why this should be so is not yet certain. Perhaps happier people enjoy a better quality of rest and relaxation and this may have a direct effect on physiology, Dr Davidson suggests. The baroreflex (which helps to regulate blood pressure) and the parasympathetic system (which promotes rest) may function more efficiently as a result.
Also, perhaps happier people recover more quickly from stress. Dr Davidson speculates that happier people may spend less time re-living stressful events, which may, in turn, cause damage to health.
Armed with this knowledge, will we all go out and have fun every day for the sake of our health? Probably not. We need fun in our lives, but we also seem to have some sort of strange bias against having fun which might make us happy.
Many people put off having fun as if fun was the equivalent of a dental appointment. They sit in front of the television for every spare hour they have and call that life.
Perhaps the past is to blame for all of this. If you’re old enough you’ll remember being advised, in Christian doctrine classes, to “mortify” yourself. This meant cutting out fun and pleasure and then fasting or kneeling for long periods of time, all of which was meant to be good for you.
I experienced this fun-denying culture as a Catholic thing, but I reckon the Presbyterians had a pretty good shot at it, too.
You might think that in recent years we’ve learned to have fun and we’re certainly more open to it. Yet much of the drinking and drug use that goes on seems to me to have nothing to do with fun. It’s more like an act of chemical mortification than of enjoyment.
So putting the findings of this research into practice isn’t by any means a simple thing. As I mentioned in an earlier column, this is particularly so for people who are depressed. But it isn’t just about depression. Many of us, whether for the reasons suggested above or for other reasons, fail to do the things that could make us happy.
Perhaps the HSE should send happiness hit squads out to knock on doors throughout the country and to drag semi-somnolent persons off their sofas to special Government-funded carnivals.
Meanwhile, to the women of Ireland: if you want your man to live longer, encourage him to have fun. Guys: vice versa.
Padraig OMorain (pomorain@ireland.com) is a counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. His book, Light Mind – Mindfulness for Daily Living, is published by Veritas. His monthly mindfulness newsletter is available free on request by e-mail