The major difficulty in examining the relationship between health and happiness is determining the manner in which all the mediating factors influence other variables. Much of the time the relationship could go either way. Because happiness is a subjective measure of one’s own well-being, it is more difficult to decipher the direction of the causal relationship between happiness and any variable. After going through the literature and trying to organize that information into a coherent model, it seems that the only definitive statement we can make about the relationship between happiness and health is that it depends on the mediating factors. Many of these were discussed in this paper, but there are likely many more to consider. One person’s happiness might lead him or her to engage in healthy lifestyle behaviors such as physical activity and healthy eating, whereas another’s happiness might lead him or her to engage in many risk-taking behaviors, such as sky-diving, bungee jumping, or extreme sports. These latter activities may increase the level of stress generally experienced and may thus contribute to negative health effects. In this sense, we can see that happiness alone cannot predict an individual’s level of health, but the behaviors and contextual factors that results from that perceived happiness or unhappiness are what we can use to better understand the relationship to health.
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