Your health: Live music may make you happier

Live music may make you happier

According to a recent study in the journal Psychology of Music, live music events have been found to be positively correlated with a person's sense of well-being.

For the study, researchers at Deakin University in Australia administered a survey to 1,000 respondents and discovered that those who attended community music events - including live shows at local cafes, clubs, concerts and festivals - or even simply danced in a crowd, reported higher levels of overall life satisfaction, salon.com reports.

The researchers focused on self-reported degrees of subjective well-being to determine a person's level of happiness and found that the sense of community experienced at a live-music event was one of the most important factors.

The study suggests it's not so much which band is observed, but the engagement between artist and fan, as well as the connection fostered among audience members, that is important.

By highlighting the interpersonal benefits of seeking out live music, the researchers hope that this can spur the development of new interventions to help treat anxiety and depression.

Early job problems lead to health issues

Your first job can be a grind. Many of us start out in gigs that we never thought we'd have to take, maybe because the job market is just too tough, and we need to make ends meet so we don't need to live in our parents' basements anymore.

For those of us who are lucky, such a situation is temporary and a steppingstone to something we love, but for others it can be the start of many years of a career that we hate.

At least you have your health, right?

Actually, it looks like the consequences of your unhappiness with your work may impact your physical and mental well-being - and perhaps sooner than you might think, The Washington Post reports.

An analysis by Ohio State University's Jonathan Dirlam and Hui Zheng, presented recently at the American Sociological Association's annual meeting, shows that job satisfaction in your late 20s and 30s appears to be linked to your health in your 40s.

Dirlam and Zheng found a striking link between people who were less satisfied with their jobs in their 20s and 30s and those who had health issues in their 40s.

That may seem intuitive given that people tend to spend eight or more hours a day at work, and dissatisfaction at work can create a lot of stress. As has been well documented, stress can have physical manifestations.

Among the specific health effects that the researchers noted among the less-than-happy group is that they were more depressed, worried and had trouble sleeping.

One interesting aspect of the analysis is that the health effect was not related to your happiness with your very first job or jobs, but with how your happiness with your job changed over time. Those with increasing satisfaction fared better than those with declining satisfaction in terms of their health.