Health and Happiness健康与幸福.doc

Its easy to get caught up in the hustle and bustle of everyday life and lose sight of what makes you happy. Really happy. But making sure your happiness meter is giving optimal readings can provide many health benefits. Happy people have younger hearts, younger arteries, and a younger RealAge. Happy people recover more quickly from surgery, cope better with pain, have lower blood pressure, and have longer life expectancy than unhappy people. Studies also suggest that happy people may have stronger immune systems -- theyre less likely to get colds and flu viruses. And when they do, their symptoms tend to be mild. Not surprisingly, happy people are better at looking after their health, too. When peoples happiness levels improve, so do their health behaviors. They exercise more, wear sunscreen, and go for regular checkups. How to Get ThereEveryone wants to be happy, and the benefits are clearly plentiful. But the fact is that people arent always great at predicting what will make them happy. If its long-term happiness youre after, you may need to learn a few new tricks. What Is Happiness?We all know when were happy and when were not. But ask a roomful of people what makes them happy and youre likely to get a wide range of responses, from watching the sunset or spending time with good friends to finding a great shoe sale or winning the office football pool. Defining happiness is no simple feat. In an effort to narrow the definition, researchers have devised a series of questionnaires to measure life satisfaction, positive mood, and subjective well-being. Some scientists are even beginning to use brain imaging to better understand the physiology of happiness. And economists have jumped on the happiness bandwagon, too, hoping to calculate the value of happiness within a sociopolitical context. So what have they discovered? What makes for a happy life? Its Partly Your GenesYour level of happiness is not entirely predetermined by your genes, but genes do play a part, jus