Happy Pill: Maths & science prove we are optimistic by nature

Every cloud has a silver lining; Look at the bright side; It’s a blessing in disguise; The sun only sets to rise; Don’t cry because it’s over smile because it happened; It’s darkest before the dawn… Perhaps being paraded by a plethora of optimistic sayings contribute to the recent science finding that optimism is ingrained in human nature.

In other words, we are inclined to look at the bright side of things. It explains why we still go on blind dates despite the horror stories we’ve heard or experienced.

The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences earlier this week, involved 100,000 words most frequently used in the world’s ten most-spoken languages.The researchers of University of Vermont and University of Adelaide gathered the most popular words from the internet, social media, books, movies, newspapers and asked five million people to rate them as ‘happy’ or ‘sad’ on a scale of one to nine.

According to the mathematical data gathered by the study, people favour positive, optimistic words more than negative, cynical ones.

Dr Lewis Mitchell, from the University of Adelaide, said in a statement, “It doesn’t matter whether it’s English, Spanish, Russian or Chinese ─ the words that make up our languages are universally biased towards positive emotions.”

The happiest language on Earth

Even though humans tend to be optimistic across all languages, the language we speak falls on a spectrum of happiness. Spanish has been dubbed as the world’s happiest language, championing over Portuguese, English and Indonesian in the top five.

Surprisingly, it’s not the harsh-sounding German at the bottom of the list. Chinese, Korean and Russian were the ‘saddest’.

So before you shed a tear over a broken heart or get struck by the blues on a rainy day, remember you have it in you to be optimistic (and happy, if you happen to speak Spanish). If you need help staying optimistic, just put Pharrell’s Happy on repeat – it won Grammys for a reason after all!

Natasha Gan