Old Diaries of Nuns

A famous study on happiness comes from the old diaries of Catholic nuns. (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2001)  180 nuns, all born before 1917, were asked to write autobiographical journal entries of their thoughts in their early days of being a nun at the School Sisters of Notre Dame.

A clever group of researchers coded these entries more than five decades later. They coded the entries for positive emotional content in the quest of learning if the level of positiveness of these 20-year-olds might predict how the rest of their lives turned out.

Study Results

Those nuns who had more overtly joyful content in their journal entries lived nearly ten years longer than the nuns whose entries were either more negative or even just neutral. By age 85, 90% of the happiest quartile of the nuns were still alive.

Happiness

Happiness does many wonderful things for us. It seems to improve our physical health as well as our emotional health. It is discovered by scientists to be the cause and not the result of good health. Of course, God has told us this all along in His Word.

How Happy Could You Really Be?

Our 4 week teleconference course on The Power of Your Imagination begins Monday night, October 5th at 8:30PM Central via phone. Our team would love to have you jump on board with us.  Team Fabulous