What Happy People Don’t Do

Subject: What Happy People Don’t Do Sun Nov 23, 2008 6:57 am

Happy people spend a lot of time socializing, going to church and
reading newspapers — but they don’t spend a lot of time watching
television, a new study finds. That’s what unhappy people do.Although people who describe themselves as happy enjoy watching
television, it turns out to be the single activity they engage in less
often than unhappy people, said John Robinson, a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland and the author of the study, which appeared in the journal Social Indicators Research.While
most large studies on happiness have focused on the demographic
characteristics of happy people — factors like age and marital status —
Dr. Robinson
and his colleagues tried to identify what activities happy people
engage in. The study relied primarily on the responses of 45,000
Americans collected over 35 years by the University of Chicago’s General Social Survey, and on published “time diary” studies recording the daily activities of participants.“We
looked at 8 to 10 activities that happy people engage in, and for each
one, the people who did the activities more — visiting others, going to
church, all those things — were more happy,” Dr. Robinson said. “TV was the one activity that showed a negative relationship. Unhappy people did it more, and happy people did it less.” But
the researchers could not tell whether unhappy people watch more
television or whether being glued to the set is what makes people
unhappy. “I don’t know that turning off the TV will make you more
happy,” Dr. Robinson said.Still, he said, the data show that people who spend the most time watching television are least happy in the long run.Since the major predictor of how much time is spent watching television is whether someone works or not, Dr. Robinson added, it’s possible that rising unemployment will lead to more TV time.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/20/health/research/20happy.html?em

What Happy People Don’t Do

What Happy People Don’t Do

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