A new study published on Wednesday in the Lancet finds that the widely held view that happiness enhances health and longevity is actually groundless. Researchers, for the study, followed approximately one million middle-aged women in Britain for 10 years.

The study researchers concluded that happiness and related measures of well-being do not have any direct effect on mortality.

Sir Richard Peto, an author of the study and a professor of medical statistics and epidemiology at the University of Oxford said he and his fellow researchers decided to look into the subject because of the widespread belief that stress and unhappiness causes diseases.

The researcher believes that such views can fuel a tendency to blame the sick for calling upon them ailments by being negative, and to warn the well to be happy otherwise they will be unhealthy.

Professor Peto in an interview said, “Believing things that aren’t true isn’t a good idea. There are enough scare stories about health”. According to the new study, earlier conducted studies confused cause and effect, and suggested that unhappiness made people ill when it is actually the other way around.

The questions asked during the study included how often the women felt happy, in control, relaxed and stressed. The participants were also asked to rate their health and give details like high blood pressure, diabetes, asthma, arthritis and depression or anxiety.

The researchers, after analyzing the data, found that unhappiness and stress do not had any association with an increased risk of death.