Sad and dumber

I have bad news for the "unhappy" and the "e-stressed." Two unrelated scientific studies that came out this week found out that unhappiness can render you more susceptible to actual illnesses and that stress from the overload of information from e-mail and text messaging can make you dumber.

The former is from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (Vol 102 No. 18, May 5, 2005) entitled "Positive affect and health-related neuroendocrine, cardiovascular, and inflammatory processes" by Andrew Steptoe, Jane Wardle, and Michael Marmot of the International Centre for Health and Society, Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, University College London. Like all scientific terms, medical terms are enigmas tightly wrapped in blankets and sealed boxes so we cut through the jargon starting with what is "positive affect." After reading the entire journal, I learned that "positive affect" was not an electrically charged neurological condition with a plus sign on it but a medical term for an umbrella type of "happiness" which I interpreted as a general and constant refusal to life’s invitation to the gutters. The scientists measured this with the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ), a medical health survey standard that has gauges and indicators for long-standing "depression" rather than mere temporary dissatisfactions over things at work or at play. "Positive affect," which from hereon will be referred to as "happiness," was measured in men and women, regardless of age, socio-economic status, gender, body mass and smoking. "Neuroendocrine" here was measured mainly in terms of a key stress hormone, cortisol, excreted with saliva; "cardiovascular" was measured in terms of blood pressure and heart rate; and "inflammatory" here was measured by the blood samples that revealed levels of fibrinogen, a protein formed in blood when stressed.

The bottom line? The subjects who ranked "happiest" had less cortisol, lower heart rates and blood pressure and less fibrinogen stress responses, during work and play, despite the ups and downs of any given work or leisure day. Thus being happy really seems to keep you healthy, healthier than those who are unhappy. Filipinos always claim that they are the happiest people on Earth. Maybe some researchers will now find it worthwhile to study if this really translates to healthy lives.

I admit that the spiritual gurus and mystics have always told us that happiness really does affect your biology but this is a science column and it delights in developments from the scientific community that either confirm or deny the logical relationship between things and provides basis for them. So I am especially relieved that I can, for now, scientifically be assured that there was wisdom in defying my elders’ admonition when I was a child to stop being so "happy" because it would invite "tragedy" soon enough. I have always thought that was nonsensical linking (not to mention cynical and rude) they routinely imposed on kids. It made no sense to me to have a "quota" for personal happiness. It is a human condition and it is free. 

My faithfully cynical e-mail senders will probably miss the point and ask that maybe some had more resources to be happy about than those who did not have any. My cynical friends who personally know me will also probably say "there she goes again with her charmed notions of life when the country is in the gutters." Well, the scientists took this into account and took subjects from all socio-economic status and their study had precedents. Previous studies have been conducted on nuns who were monitored for 60 years based on their "happiness" gauged when they were 22; another 20 year-study on life satisfaction and mortality among adult Finns as well as another on the likelihood of mortality within a seven-year period among British adults whose "positive affect" was absent, in other words, glum. To put a lid on something that makes your body breathe a little easier, pump blood with less pressure and make your blood less likely to get stuck in your arteries is counter-intuitive.

So if you are a "happy" one, you can taunt the "unhappy" with your longevity and even wisdom from Oscar Wilde: "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." But don’t count on naming those stars if you are "e-stressed." Dr. Glenn Wilson of the Institute of Psychiatry of the University of London recently did a study for Hewlett Packard and found that the overload from the information from text messaging and e-mails can cause what I call "e-stress" that can apparently make us "e-diots." In IQ terms, the study says it may mean a lowering of your IQ by as much as 10 points. "Infomania," as they call the overload of information, contain many things that are just too much to reconcile and they all tug at your attention which can disrupt the focus you need to learn particular things meaningfully and intelligently. E-mails and text messages, which by their nature are instantly accessible and transmissible, can distract one’s concentration from the things at hand, the things that require your measured, deliberate attention. (To those who will say they can afford the loss, remember that this is only one medium of info that could cause it. TV, radio or print, I think, need to be studied for their own IQ-reducing roles; only then can you sum up your losses.)

The "unhappy" doomsayers have enough reasons to insist on their own self-limits to inner joy because the country and the world are headed for self-destruction, and with "technology" apparently making us dumber, they can add this to their list. But if you are one of the "happy" ones trying to foil doom and gloom, sickness and "e-diocy," you may take comfort in the words of the late economist Donella Meadows who outlived her own prediction of 1990’s doom and gloom for man and the Earth’s resources as one of the authors of the famous Limits to Growth, the 1972 Report to the Club of Rome. She said, "You will outlive the bastards."

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