03 Sep Here’s some good news if you want to sleep better and live longer!
via Inc.com by Bill Murphy
Here’s some incredibly good news, especially if you’re the kind of person who wants to sleep better and live longer — maybe even many years longer.
(Honestly, who doesn’t fit into at least one of those two categories?)
Let’s start with living longer. An enormous study recently combined two research projects that examined data on a total of 71,173 people, some of them over 30 years, and found that having an optimistic outlook on life was associated with living significantly longer.
How much longer? As much as 15 percent, which could easily translate to 10 years or more.
The researchers, from several institutions including Harvard, drew on data from the Nurses’ Health Study (NHS) the Veterans Affairs Normative Aging Study (NAS).
They found that maintaining an optimistic outlook was associated with greater longevity than their less-optimistic peers,regardless of other factors that we associate with longer life, such as:
- making healthy choices (or lack thereof),
- socioeconomic status,
- health conditions,
- incidence of depression, and
- “social integration.”
“Our results further suggest that optimism is specifically related to 11 to 15 percent longer life span, on average, and to greater odds of achieving ‘exceptional longevity,’ that is, living to the age of 85 or beyond,” the study’s authors wrote.
The study was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
All of that is pretty darn good news, especially if you can train yourself to be the kind of person who instinctively looks on the bright side.
But wait, there’s still more…
…keep reading the full & original article HERE