You're Happiest At 50

The closer you get to 50, a new study opines, the happier you are more likely to be. According to the research, based on a Gallup poll from 2008, generally, life satisfaction is high at age 18 but sinks until about 50. Then, it starts to rise, increasing so steadily that most people feel better about their lives at 85 than they did at 18.

"It's a very encouraging fact that we can expect to be happier in our early 80s than we were in our 20s," Andrew J. Oswald, who teaches psychology at Warwick Business School in England, told The New York Times. "And it's not being driven by things that happen in life. It's something very deep and quite human that seems to be driving this."

Boffins aren't sure what that "something" is, reports The New York Daily News.

"It could be that there are environmental changes, or it could be psychological changes about the way we view the world, or it could even be biological-for example brain chemistry or endocrine changes," said Arthur A. Stone, the lead author of the study.

To reach the conclusion, boffins polled more than 340,000 people in the US, asking subjects to rank their overall life satisfaction and answer more specific questions about their emotions on the previous day.

Source-ANI