Want to Live Longer or Be Happier? A Massive New Study Says It’s Something to Worry About

They call it “nature’s gift for longevity.”

By Bill Murphy Jr.

When I was in sixth grade, I used to torture myself with a particular hypothetical I’d heard someone pose: Would you rather live a shorter but happy, carefree life or a longer life that wasn’t quite so easy? 

I’d twist myself into knots over something like this. 

The instinct is to say the happy one. Who wants to be unhappy? Trading longevity for happiness seemed like a lopsided bargain. 

Then again, I’d run around and take the other side of the argument: What if unhappiness had its own value? What if worrying about things actually made you do things — useful things, meaningful things — that a carefree person wouldn’t bother with? 

Didn’t that potentially loop back around to something resembling happiness after all? I was 11 years old. Welcome to my world. All these years later, a new study suggests it might not have been a pure hypothetical. 

The evolution of worry 

In a study published in the Science Bulletin, researchers were trying to solve a genuine paradox in personality psychology: neuroticism — the tendency toward worry, anxiety, and negative emotion — is consistently associated with worse health outcomes. More mental disorders, more chronic disease, higher mortality. Yet, from an evolutionary standpoint, a species that didn’t worry would have died out long ago. Worry is what keeps you from stepping in front of a bus. 

So why does something that evolved to help us survive seem to kill us faster? 

The answer, the researchers found, is that neuroticism isn’t really one thing. It’s two. 

Two kinds of worry 

Using a novel method that maps personality traits across a large population — drawing on health records, brain imaging, genome-wide data, and behavioral surveys covering many thousands of people from the UK Biobank — they identified two distinct dimensions running through neuroticism that operate almost independently. 

The first is what most people think of when they hear the word: general emotional distress. Mood instability, feelings of helplessness, and depression. 

This dimension is associated with higher rates of mental illness and worse overall well-being.  

No surprise there. 

The second dimension is what the researchers call ERIS — Emotional Reactivity and Internal Stability. 

At one end sit people prone to worry and anxiety. At the other end sit people prone to a kind of simmering fed-up-ness and mood swings. 

High-ERIS individuals — the worriers — live significantly longer than people low in neuroticism overall because of what worry tends to make people do. 

They go to the doctor more, avoid risky behaviors, and pay attention to diet. 

This tracks with research I wrote about recently. Married people appear to have lower cancer rates, in part because spouses tend to notice when something is off and push their partners toward care they might otherwise skip. 

Anxiety, in this framing, is a chronic low-grade alert system that keeps people from ignoring things they probably shouldn’t ignore. 

“Moderately worrying while maintaining emotional stability may indeed be nature’s gift for longevity,” the researchers wrote. 

The ancient wisdom version 

The study opens with an old Chinese proverb: “Life springs from sorrow and calamity; death comes from ease and pleasure.” The researchers cite it as a kind of cultural intuition that their data now gives some empirical backing. 

Perhaps it’s vindication for anyone who ever spent sixth grade worried about being too worried. 

A few caveats: this study is correlational, not a controlled experiment. Also, neuroticism at the clinical level — severe anxiety, chronic rumination — is still associated with worse outcomes. 

Also, this research isn’t a license to catastrophize. The distinction the researchers are drawing is between productive, risk-aware anxiety and destabilizing emotional chaos. One appears to add years. The other doesn’t. 

So, my childhood hypothetical turns out to be harder than it looked. It’s not a simple trade of years for happiness, but two levers that may pull in different directions, and you may not get to choose which one you’re wired for. 

My sixth-grade self would have found that deeply unsettling. 

But then again…