Optimism, happiness, & vitamin D protect your health....

Today's post: Tuesday, 7-1-2008

Suppose you eat right and get exercise every week.

And, you take many supplements to protect your health already.

Can you get healthier, and protect yourself from heart attack, stroke, & death in other proven & powerful ways?

Two very powerful ways were in the news I read today.

One came in my health email & the other was on Yahoo news.

1. Vitamin D turns out to be undersupplied to many people today who work inside all week & then watch TV inside during a lot of their weekends.

This means that most people no longer get enough sunshine produced vitamin D. So to have enough vitamin D in your body supplements are essential. And, in study after study, we are finding that people need more like 3,000 to 4,000 iu a day of vitamin D than the 400 once thought to be enough. (In the 1930’s when people walked more & spent a LOT more time outside it may have been. For most people today, that is no longer true.)

We’ve posted already on the value of taking at least 1,000 to 2,000 iu a day of vitamin D in its D3 form. It helps prevent depression & bad moods. And, it helps prevent all cancers. It also helps prevent osteoporosis as it helps the calcium you eat build your bones. There is even some evidence it prevents MS & other autoimmune diseases.

The email I got today reported a study that found that compared to people who didn’t get enough vitamin D, people who did were less much likely to die each year than the people who did not – of ALL causes. And, this was even true in people with existing heart disease. Wow.

Vitamin D3 in 1,000 iu capsules is very inexpensive. They run something like $6 including tax for 100 capsules.

So, in addition to any multivitamin you take, it might really pay you to add 1,000 or 2,000 iu of vitamin D each day.

2. And, it turns out optimism & doing the things that maximize your happiness produce positive effects on your health that may be even more powerful in protecting your health than taking vitamin D.

Here’s my excerpt of the article I found today on Yahoo in its news headline display.:

“The Keys to Happiness, and Why We Don't Use Them
By Robin Lloyd, Special to LiveScience posted: 27 February 2006”

(& Found on Yahoo News page on Tues, 7-1-2008)

“The Keys to Happiness….”

“What works, and what doesn't

Happiness does not come via prescription drugs, although 10 percent of women 18 and older and 4 percent of men take antidepressants, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. Anti-depressants benefit those with mental illness but are no happiness guarantee, researchers say.

Nor will money or prosperity buy happiness for many of us.

Money that lifts people out of poverty increases happiness,
but after that, the better paychecks stop paying off sense-of-well-being dividends, research shows.

One route to more happiness is called "flow," an engrossing state that comes during creative or playful activity, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has found. Athletes, musicians, writers, gamers, and religious adherents know the feeling. It comes less from what you're doing than from how you do it.

Sonja Lyubomirsky of the University of California at Riverside has discovered that the road toward a more satisfying and meaningful life involves a recipe repeated in schools, churches and synagogues. Make lists of things for which you're grateful in your life, practice random acts of kindness, forgive your enemies, notice life's small pleasures, take care of your health, practice positive thinking, and invest time and energy into friendships and family.

The happiest people have strong friendships, says Ed Diener, a psychologist University of Illinois. Interestingly his research finds that most people are slightly to moderately happy, not unhappy.

"There are selfish reasons to behave in altruistic ways," says Gregg Easterbrook, author of "The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse" (Random House, 2004).

"Research shows that people who are grateful, optimistic and forgiving have better experiences with their lives, more happiness, fewer strokes, and higher incomes," according to Easterbrook. "If it makes world a better place at same time, this is a real bonus."

Diener has collected specific details on this. People who positively evaluate their well-being on average have stronger immune systems, are better citizens at work, earn more income, have better marriages, are more sociable, and cope better with difficulties.”

X* X* X* X* X* X*

(I added the bolding to the points in this article that struck me as significant. They were NOT in the original.)

University of Pennsylvania’s Martin Seligman studied what aspects of optimistic thinking produced these effects. He found two very different factors.

a) He found that people who think bad things are temporary, specific in their bad effects, & have specific causes – and often can be changed, were more optimistic.

Since these things are often true, in this aspect optimistic people tended to be much MORE realistic than the pessimistic people who tended to think that bad things are permanent, incomprehensible, & likely ruin everything.

This factor makes them dramatically more able to withstand bad events & to recover from them.

In their relationships with other people, this aspect of optimism is incredibly powerful & effective.

This makes optimistic people more likely to believe people who are acting badly are in a bad mood or having problems temporarily instead of believing such people are bad & will always act badly. This makes optimistic people more forgiving & understanding & easy to live with. It’s why their marriages & friendships last and tend to go at least moderately well.

b) He also found that optimistic people tended to think good things are permanent & that the actions they take are likely to make things better & be effective than people who are pessimistic.

(I think it likely that the reason that regularly remembering things you are grateful for & doing small acts of kindness make people happier and less depressed is that they strengthen the belief of the person doing them that good things are permanently in their lives & that they are effective in doing things successfully.)

The bad news is optimists often believed in their own effectiveness more than the facts indicated & were sometimes less accurate & realistic about their chances of success than the pessimists.

The good news is that if they were also prudent about how they took risky actions, they would take actions to make things better & continue to do the things that worked & continue to try new things when their attempts did not work.

They visualized a successful outcome & took action.

By contrast, the pessimists would tend to fail to act or would give up easily if their first attempts failed.

Bottom line, the pessimists were perceptually more accurate. But the optimists were dramatically more effective in almost every area of their lives.

For this reason, optimists are much more likely to exercise, stop smoking or never start, believe that eating right will protect their health & do it, and to take supplements.

They also tend to have more social support and make more money from both of these factors.

It’s hardly any wonder that they have better health than the pessimists.