Buzz, the energetic Honey Nut Cheerios bumblebee, supported the motto, “Bee happy. Bee healthy.” The beloved bee was on the right track — being happy might actually lead to a healthier life.
To study this phenomenon, Harvard University was gifted more than $21 million dollars Friday to create the Lee Kum Sheung Center for Health and Happiness, an addition to the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, according to a same-day press release.
According to the release, “The new Center will support the identification of psychological, social, and emotional strengths and assets that may protect against some diseases and enable people to enjoy longer, happier, and healthier lives.”
Further, the release highlighted that science’s ability to comprehend positive social environments is limited. Close, personal relationships, meaningful jobs, regular exercise and a positive mindset may enhance both psychological and physical well-being, the release stated, which in return may increase a healthy life by years — aspects the new center plans to explore.
There has previously been a lot of research conducted that suggests that different aspects of happiness can improve health, and transversely, health can improve happiness, said Julie Rafferty, associate vice dean of communications at the School of Public Health.
“A lot of times in public health and in medicine, the people who work in those fields are very focused on how to prevent and treat disease, and so we can look at that and say, ‘OK, a goal of medicine and public health and medicine is to prevent disease.’ But there’s more to life than merely living a life that’s free of disease,” she said. “Part of the reason why the center exists is to find ways to not only improve health through happiness, but to help people lead both healthier and happier lives.”
Rafferty said the faculty members who will lead the new center similarly believe health is not merely the absence of disease, although being happy may protect against disease.
“There is still no clear scientific consensus regarding the relationship between happiness and health,” she said. “Their hope is that this new center will help focus public health and medical research beyond work focused primarily on risk factors that lead to disease and the treatments needed to cure or slow disease. The new center will focus on the positive aspects of health, and also on factors that promote attaining and maintaining high levels of well-being and protect against conditions such as cardiovascular diseases.”
Once operating, the center plans to focus on compiling existing research, as well as focusing on making new discoveries about the role of happiness and well-being in physical health, according to the release. Currently, the research is “scattered across studies conducted in a broad range of disciplines.”
The center has plans for a few initial efforts such as focusing on developing a “happiness index” that can systematically and scientifically access well-being; understanding the relationship between psychological and physical well-being and examining the role of communications on health and happiness, the press release stated.
“[Researchers are looking to measure] different aspects of what we would call happiness,” Rafferty said. “We don’t really know which of these aspects will have the greatest effect on health … There are a lot of different aspects of things that we call happiness that have the greatest effect on health, and how can we actually measure that in a scientifically rigorous way?”
Ultimately, the center aims to bring together Harvard faculty, students and researchers from numerous disciplines to work toward discovering what it means to be happy and be healthy.
“The goal of the Center is to bring together people from a variety of fields to make discoveries that can inform personal behaviors, medical care, public health programs, and wide-ranging public policies not traditionally associated with health care and medicine,” Rafferty wrote in an email, “but that can help people live longer, happier, and healthier lives.”
Rebecca Zeng and Emily Langan contributed to the reporting of this article.
