Age may be “nothin’ but a number,” but a study from the London School of Economics and Political Sciences finds that how happy we are is directly related to how old we are. And get this: they’ve even figured out the age when we reach “peak happiness” in life.
Researchers surveyed 23,000 Germans between the ages of 17 and 85 about how satisfied they are in life, and how happy they predicted they’d be in five years. Then five years later, they had them take the survey again.
From this, they found that happiness follows a U-shape pattern between the ages of 20 and 70 and that our levels of joy peak when we’re 23 and 69 years old. That leaves a lot of years in between!
So what’s happening between 23 and 69 that kind of makes our satisfaction with life bottom out? Scientists aren’t really sure, but they say the “lifetime curve of happiness” is the result of young people overestimating future happiness and older folks underestimating it. Which basically just means it’s all about our individual perceptions of how happy we are. So maybe we should all be looking on the bright side more? YES!
Source: Byrdie
Thanks for listening! ~Tommy & Brook