GAU SURVEY: "Happiness is Decreasing in TRNC as Income level is Increasing"
According to recently released survey “Yearly Expectation Survey” conducted by the Kyrenia Research Institute which is connected to Girne American University (GAU), happy minority was 3.3% but this year the ratio rose to 7.7% ...READ MORE Learn more »

University of Warwick research indicates that eating more fruit and vegetables can substantially increase people's later happiness levels.

Published in the prestigious American Journal of Public Health, the study is one of the first major scientific attempts to explore psychological well-being beyond the traditional finding that fruit and vegetables can reduce risk of cancer and heart attacks.

Happiness benefits were detected for each extra daily portion of fruit and vegetables up to 8 portions per day.

The researchers concluded that people who changed from almost no fruit and veg to eight portions of fruit and veg a day would experience an increase in life satisfaction equivalent to moving from unemployment to employment. The well-being improvements occurred within 24 months.

Cancer
The study followed more than 12,000 randomly selected people. These subjects kept food diaries and had their psychological well-being measured. The authors found large positive psychological benefits within two years of an improved diet.

Professor Andrew Oswald said: "Eating fruit and vegetables apparently boosts our happiness far more quickly than it improves human health. People's motivation to eat healthy food is weakened by the fact that physical-health benefits, such as protecting against cancer, accrue decades later.

However, well-being improvements from increased consumption of fruit and vegetables are closer to immediate."

The work is a collaboration between the University of Warwick, England and the University of Queensland, Australia. The researchers found that happiness increased incrementally for each extra daily portion of fruit and vegetables up to eight portions per day. The study involved an examination of longitudinal food diaries of 12,385 randomly sampled Australian adults over 2007, 2009, and 2013 in the Household, Income, and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey. The authors adjusted the effects on incident changes in happiness and life satisfaction for people's changing incomes and personal circumstances.

Western diet
The study has policy implications, particularly in the developed world where the typical citizen eats an unhealthy diet. The findings could be used by health professionals to persuade people to consume more fruits and vegetables.

Dr Redzo Mujcic, research fellow at the University of Queensland, said: "Perhaps our results will be more effective than traditional messages in convincing people to have a healthy diet. There is a psychological payoff now from fruit and vegetables—not just a lower health risk decades later."
The authors found that alterations in fruit and vegetable intake were predictive of later alterations in happiness and satisfaction with life. They took into account many other influences, including changes in people's incomes and life circumstances. One part of the study examined information from the Australian Go for 2&5 Campaign. The campaign was run in some Australian states which have promoted the consumption of two portions of fruit and five portions of vegetables each day.

Antioxidants
The academics think it may be possible eventually to link this study to current research into antioxidants which suggests a connection between optimism and carotenoid in the blood. However they argue that further research is needed in this area.

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Happiness is a state of mind, the gurus say.

Well, actually, it could be more a function of genes, the authors of an unusual scientific study asserted on Thursday January 14 2016.

Nations whose inhabitants boast a certain gene variant, they found, had much higher self-reported happiness levels.

Happiness at the national level was more closely related to this variant than factors like wealth, country stability, or even disease prevalence -- possibly explaining, for example, why Nigerians rate themselves happier than Germans.

"Feeling happy, relaxed and in a good mood does not depend on the prosperity and safety of a country," study co-author Michael Minkov of the Varna University of Management in Bulgaria, told AFP.

"Actually the correlation between happiness and safety seems to be inverse. The highest murder and robbery rates in the world are in northern Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa and that is precisely where the happiest and most relaxed people are."

The study, published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Happiness Studies, claims to be the first to show a link between genetics and happiness at the national level.

Minkov and his colleague Michael Harris Bond from Hong Kong Polytechnic University, relied on the World Values Survey (WVS), a ranking based on questionnaires in which respondents have to rate themselves as "very happy," "rather happy," "not very happy" or "not at all happy".

They compared this to data on the ethnic prevalence of "A allele", a variant of a gene involved in regulating anandamide, a substance which enhances sensory pleasure and helps reduce pain.
The country with the highest happiness rating, Mexico, also had the highest estimated prevalence of A allele, the researchers found.

Ghana and Nigeria also had high ratings for both, as did Columbia, Venezuela and Ecuador.

Iraq and Jordan, along with Hong Kong, China, Thailand and Taiwan — all of which had a low prevalence of A allele — were also the least likely to rate themselves as "very happy".

Northern Europeans had a much higher prevalence of the A allele, and rate themselves happier than those in central and southern Europe.

The genetic data used corresponded to ethnicity, which meant researchers had to estimate "national" figures by taking into account each country's mix of ethnic groups.

Evolution was one possible explanation for higher A allele prevalence in equatorial and tropical environments, said Minkov.

Perhaps "to survive in those stressful societies you need genes that help you cope with the stress," he said. The same may be true for cold, harsh northern Europe.

Genes are, of course, not the whole story, the team emphasized.

And there were exceptions: Russians and Estonians, with high A allele prevalence, scored low on the happiness scale.

This "may be a lasting effect of the economic and political difficulties that East European countries continue to experience," the authors wrote.

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Habits play a major role in determining our levels of happiness, explains best-selling author Gretchen Rubin. Even when we know what it takes to be happy, we sometimes falter under the weight of our personal habits. In this interview, Rubin explains that success requires a commitment to follow through on your self-improvement endeavors.

Watch video below:

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT: One question is how are happiness and habits related? And I’ve been researching and writing and thinking and talking to people about happiness for years. And what I started to notice was that habits play a really important role in happiness. Because a lot of times when I would talk to people there was some big happiness challenge in their life that I realize was actually related to some core habit. And it wasn’t that they didn’t think or know that if they got more sleep they’d feel better or that if they didn’t spend so much time on the Internet during work they’d be more productive, or whatever. They had identified the change that they wanted to make but for some reason they weren’t able to stick to that change. They weren’t able to make that change happen no matter how much they wanted to. They could see that there was a happiness gain out there but they weren’t able to translate it into action. And that got me very focused on the issue of habit change. So how is it that we specifically change a habit so that we can make these desires, these aims that are so pressing in our lives – how can we translate it into real action, real change in our everyday lives. Because the fact is, you know, for most of us there’s a lot of low hanging fruit. There’s a lot of things – just part of our ordinary day – things that don’t take a lot of time, energy or money that if we could do them they would make us happier. Well we really have to get ourselves to actually follow through. And so that’s where habits come into play because habits are the thing that allow you to make those changes and just put them on automatic pilot. They’re just part of your everyday life and they make you happier.

Credit: GRETCHEN RUBIN - BIG THINK

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