Study: Optimists Lead Healthier Lives

A series of studies recently featured in the Harvard Men’s Health Watch newsletter substantiates the claim that optimists are generally healthier than pessimists.

The research—which includes long-term studies beginning in the 1960s, and more recent short-term studies—primarily focused on cardiac health, including blood pressure and heart disease.

Researchers used a variety of psychological and personality tests to place respondents on a spectrum between optimistic and pessimistic, concluding that in all of the categories examined, people who were deemed to be more optimistic fared better than those deemed to be more pessimistic.

“People who are optimistic have a good outlook on life—they treat themselves better, take better care of themselves, and live longer,” said Harvey B. Simon, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and the author of the article profiling the studies. “The bottom line seems to be that people with a bright outlook have better health.”

In one of the studies, researchers infected 193 volunteers with a common respiratory virus. Those that were more positive were less likely to develop viral symptoms than their less optimistic counterparts.

Another study followed 6,959 students from the University of North Carolina for over 40 years. Researchers found the most pessimistic individuals had a 42 percent higher death rate than the most optimistic subjects. Simon said the findings show that there is strong connection between the brain and overall health.

“I think this is just one of many examples of the unity of mind and body, and the fact that the mind is a really, very powerful organ,” he said. Gregory L. Fricchione, a professor of psychiatry at the Medical School, said he agrees with the findings presented in the article.

“The resiliency that we have as human beings, as human organisms, is made up of these components,” he said. “We need nutrition, we need exercise, but we also need healthy minds.”

But despite the findings, Simon said that whether a person is optimistic or pessimistic may be genetic.

“This isn’t just a question of staying cool, or trying to order priorities, those are all useful strategies, but they don’t affect your basic outlook,” he said. “I don’t think there really is any lone way to change one’s disposition.”

Tristan G. Brown ’10 said while he is pessimistic about political issues and global warming, when it comes to personal life he tends to be optimistic, based on some of the studies’ definition of optimism that a person is optimistic if he or she does not assume blame for negative events.

“When things go wrong, I blame others,” he joked.

—Staff writer Synne D. Chapman can be reached at chapman2@fas.harvard.edu.