Happiness Is the Best Medicine

I imagine that quite a number of you may have seen the headlines about happiness correlating with a longer life. This Wired aretilce goes into a bit more detial about the studies than most newspaper reports. And there is an interesting and overlooked fact that the studies showed up too ... "We learned that the patients with higher levels of spirituality or higher levels of religiosity may have a significantly slower progression of cognitive decline,"
This didn't get reported in most reports I saw in the UK -probably a bit too uncomfortable to the comfortable secularism of most British media. It is interesting also because it probably corresponds to the actuarial fact that clergy tend to live longer on average than the average for the rest of the poulation [though whether that will still be true in 30-50 years when the current clergy who seem to be suffering stress more than used to be the case, is another matter]. At first this looks like a good thing, but what it tends to mean is that there is something of a pensions crisis for those bodies responsible for clergy pension arrangements who planned on clergy being like the average citizen when it came to shaking hands with the grim reaper. The reason for a pope holding office till he dies may be his pension scheme ...
Wired News: Happiness Is the Best Medicine: