Happiness Can Affect the Genes, New Study Reveals

Being happy not only makes you feel good, but it does wonders for your genes, a new study found.

Many studies have previously drawn a connection between a happy mind and a healthy body - the happier you are, the better health outcomes we seem to have. In a meta-analysis (overview) of 150 studies on this topic, researchers put it like this: "Inductions of well-being lead to healthy functioning, and inductions of ill-being lead to compromised health."

Now a new study, published Thursday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) questions that previously held belief. Happiness may not be as good for the body as researchers thought. It might even be bad.

"Happiness without meaning characterizes a relatively shallow, self-absorbed or even selfish life, in which things go well, needs and desire are easily satisfied, and difficult or taxing entanglements are avoided," the authors of the study wrote.

"If anything, pure happiness is linked to not helping others in need." While being happy is about feeling good, meaning is derived from contributing to others or to society in a bigger way. As Roy Baumeister, one of the researchers, told me, "Partly what we do as human beings is to take care of others and contribute to others. This makes life meaningful but it does not necessarily make us happy."

The investigators found that people with high levels of happiness that comes from having a deep sense of purpose and meaning in life (eudaimonic well-being) had favorable gene expression in their immune cells. They had low levels of inflammatory gene expression and strong expression of antiviral and antibody genes.

The opposite was true of people with high levels of happiness associated with self-gratification (hedonic well-being). These people had high levels of inflammatory gene expression and low antiviral and antibody gene expression.

Interestingly, the researchers found that people with high levels of hedonic well-being didn't feel any worse than those with high levels of eudaimonic well-being.

"Both seemed to have the same high levels of positive emotion. However, their genomes were responding very differently even though their emotional states were similarly positive," Steven Cole, a professor of medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, said in a university news release.

"What this study tells us is that doing good and feeling good have very different effects on the human genome, even though they generate similar levels of positive emotion," Cole said. "Apparently, the human genome is much more sensitive to different ways of achieving happiness than are conscious minds."