Research Uncovers Clues About the Origins and Promotion of Well-Being and Longevity
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Optimism and a positive outlook are associated with a longer, healthier life.
What does it take to live a long and happy life? You might be tempted to say the answer lies in having “good genes” and plenty of friends and loved ones around you. Certainly, those are key factors for health and well-being, but there are others that are at the heart of two recent studies aimed at helping people live longer lives characterized by optimal physical and mental health.
One study focused on the importance of positivity in healthy aging. The other demonstrated how technology may one day be harnessed to help individuals and their mental health-care providers.
Positivity Prescription
While race and socioeconomic factors can have significant impacts on a person’s health and life expectancy, a recent study, led by researchers at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, found that optimism is a simple, but important trait associated with a longer lifespan, and that a positive outlook benefits people from a variety of backgrounds.
“Although optimism itself may be affected by social structural factors, such as race and ethnicity, our research suggests that the benefits of optimism may hold across diverse groups,” says Hayami Koga, the study’s lead author and a PhD student in the Harvard University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences studying in the Population Health Sciences program in partnership with the Harvard T.H. Chan School. “A lot of previous work has focused on deficits or risk factors that increase the risks for diseases and premature death. Our findings suggest that there’s value to focusing on positive psychological factors, like optimism, as possible new ways of promoting longevity and healthy aging across diverse groups.”
The study, published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, involved more than 159,000 women who were between the ages of 50 and 79 at the start of the 26-year study. The study included women from across racial and ethnic groups, and from a broad cross section of geographic and socioeconomic profiles.
Of the participants, the 25 percent who were the most optimistic were likely to have a 5.4 percent longer life span and a 10 percent greater likelihood of living to at least age 90, compared with the 25 percent who were the least optimistic. And though factors such as healthy eating and regular exercise are critical to health and longevity, the study found only minor associations between a person’s healthy lifestyle and level of optimism.
Of course, for people who are not naturally optimistic, deliberate and intentional efforts pursuing optimism may be helpful. Talking with a therapist could be beneficial in many ways.
A Map to Better Mental Health
Finding your way to a more optimistic outlook and a healthier physical and mental well-being may one day come down to creating a map to help you get there. In a separate study, led by investigators at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and published in the journal Aging, researchers used artificial intelligence to explore psychological well-being and develop a framework for helping individuals improve their long-term life satisfaction. The researchers created a model based on a branch of artificial intelligence called deep learning, which imitates the way humans accumulate certain types of knowledge.
Questionnaires were used to estimate a participant’s psychological age (a reflection of how old one behaves and feels), as well as future well-being and depression risk. With those estimates in hand, researchers created a “self-organizing map” that laid out an assessment of the individual’s level of well-being and propensity for depression. Regions associated with high and low well-being were identified.
Based on that profile, each map included a recommended list of personalized daily tips to boost well-being—a road map, of sorts, that could take someone on the shortest path between a starting point and a destination in which their well-being could be maximized.
The MGH researchers are hopeful that this kind of information and mapping approach could be used to direct cognitive behavioral therapy and other mental health interventions to provide a personalized path toward improved well-being. The map could also be used to track progress toward goals established at the start of therapy.
Another possible form the map could take could be a computer or smartphone app that allows users to understand the behaviors and choices that could lead to low and high well-being and make daily decisions that will keep them on the right track.
“In this work, we highlight aging-related trends in well-being and have brought forward a dynamic model of human psychology that allows maximizing one’s future level of happiness,” says study co-author Nancy Etcoff, PhD, director of MGH’s Program in Aesthetics and Well-being.”
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