Want to live a long and healthy life? Then, ...watch your words.
That's right. A study analyzed 50,000 words in 800 million tweets. Then researchers categorized them into positive social attitudes (words such as: morning, helpful, fabulous, share, running, forward, great, interesting, lunch, discussion, and seems) and negative social attitudes (words like: mad, alone, annoying, can't, mood, bored, tired, and expletives).
When the tweets were matched with a Center for Disease Control map over the same counties as the tweets, high correlations between the aggressive, angry, isolating words and arteriosclerosis were discovered.
The friendly expressions meant lower risk of heart disease and better longevity.
A cross-sectional regression model, based only on Twitter language, predicted atherosclerotic heart disease (AHD) mortality significantly better than did a model that combined 10 common demographic, socioeconomic, and health risk factors, including smoking, diabetes, hypertension, and obesity.
Since only 10% of us want to actually engage in our own personal development (oh, way too hard), just try to be happier! That's easy enough.
Make happiness a habit, and your health will improve, too.
Here are some of my favorite ideas:
- Smiling is contagious - try to get another person to smile or laugh every day.
- Re-live a recent nice experience by journaling about it for a couple of minutes.
- Even when alone, enter each room with confidence, good posture, and a smile. Then it will be natural for you to enter a room full of people. And, they will be drawn toward a positive and confident you.
- Play more! Turn drudgery into a game.
- Get out in nature and appreciate its wonders.
- Be genuinely interested in what others have to say.
What are your "happy habits?"