Young people, enjoy the happy lifestyle now as happiness has a trend of declining as one gets older; it slowly fades away. This is according to the study conducted by the researchers from the Dartmouth College and University of Warwick who collected data from two million people from 80 nations in the span of 35 years.

“Their study, reported last month in the journal Social Science & Medicine, showed that happiness is, in fact, U-shaped: it’s highest at the beginning and end of our lives and lowest in the middle. That translates to deepening levels of depression at around age 40 for women and 50 for men.”

It happens to everyone because people tend to focus on wrong things in life. The good thing is happiness recur after mid-life “By the time you’re 70, if you’re still physically fit, then, on average, you’re as happy and mentally healthy as a 20-year-old,” said one of the authors of the study, Andrew Oswald.

Many people tend to look for happiness in career recognition or status where gaining success is always the priority. According to John Izzo, an author and leadership consultant based in Vancouver, “life isn’t a contest,” he said.

“They discover that these things don’t give the happiness they’re promised in them,”

Meanwhile, some people from ages 58 to 70 who seldom gained success in their work is successful in their lives.

“But they never had to go through the stage of being disillusioned with their lives because they had already recognized that happiness is not found in status and money, Mr. Izzo said.”

During his numerous interviews for his book, The Five Secrets You Must Discover Before You Die, Mr. Izzo learned that happy people focused “on the things they love rather than on outside definition of success.”

It is not inevitable for a person to fall in a mid-life depression. All one needs is self-awareness. “If you think about it, being true to yourself is a call to happiness,” he said.

“If you know who you are, you stand a much better chance of living the life that suits you.”

(Read Canada.com, image courtesy of meyshandworld.)