Good Mental Health And Relationships Make People Happier Than Doubling Their Income: Study
Money can't buy love, or happiness: A new study from the London School of Economics has found that the “key to happiness” is good mental health and having a partner. These factors generally make people more joyful than if they doubled their income, the BBC reported.
Researchers examined responses from 200,000 British people before identifying that poor mental health appeared to pose the greatest threat to a person's overall contentment.
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The report suggests that tackling anxiety and depression, rather than poverty, would generally make people happier, according to The Guardian.
"The evidence shows that the things that matter most for our happiness and for our misery are our social relationships and our mental and physical health,” report co-author Professor Richard Layard told the BBC.
"In the past, the state has successively taken on poverty, unemployment, education and physical health. But equally important now are domestic violence, alcoholism, depression and anxiety conditions, alienated youth, exam-mania and much else. These should become center stage," he said.
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Prior research, published in March in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, looked at the levels of life satisfaction in 18,527 adults from two separate samples in Germany and the United Kingdom. They found that most people were happy when they avoided losing money, not when they got more, Medical Daily reported at the time.
The findings showed that when people got a raise at work, their overall life satisfaction didn’t actually increase, regardless of their personality. However, when people reported a loss of income, they also reported being less satisfied with their lives.
Source: Clark A, Fleche S, Layard R, Powdthavee N, Ward G. Origins of happiness: Evidence and policy implications. VOX. 2016.
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