Pollution Has A Direct Impact On Your Happiness, Making You More Depressed Says New Study

For years now, China has been struggling to tackle its high levels of pollution across its major cities.

It's estimated that an average of 1.1 million people die prematurely each year thanks to it. But now, a new study indicates it may also be why people are unhappy.

Researchers at MIT have been correlating data on China's urban pollution problem with the happiness levels of the people living there. As it turns out, the more polluted a city becomes the more unhappy its inhabitants get.

Specifically, despite an annual economic growth rate of 8 percent, the satisfaction levels among China's urban population have risen by far less than expected. The study indicates that it's not just a lack of public services, real estate inflation, and a food shortage that causes unhappiness, but also air pollution caused by coal burning, overcrowding of cars, and industrialization in cities.

"Pollution also has an emotional cost," says lead researcher Siqi Zheng.

"People are unhappy, and that means they may make irrational decisions." With higher pollution levels, people have been shown to be more impulsive and reckless. "So we wanted to explore a broader range of effects of air pollution on people's daily lives in highly polluted Chinese cities."

To study this, researchers normally have to rely on questionnaires. This time however, the researchers used real-time data from social media to track how changing daily pollution levels affected people's happiness in 144 Chinese cities. Not only does it provide a more comprehensive look, it also allows them to pull from a larger, more varied pool of subjects.

They then applied a machine learning algorithm to cross-reference the 210 million geo-tagged posts they picked from Weibo, with data on the atmospheric quality in the poster's area at the time, particularly the levels of dangerous PM 2.5 particulate matter.

They found a significantly negative correlation between pollution and happiness levels. Worse, it seems women are more sensitive to higher levels of pollution than men. Strangely enough, people from the cleanest and dirtiest cities were more affected than those in cities somewhat midway. The former is likely because people with health conditions prefer to move to cleaner locales, while those in already dirty cities are aware of the health effects of bad pollution, and therefore upset that they're helpless about it.

So if you find yourself annoyed about being stuck in traffic getting to work, or just fed up with life in general when you live in Mumbai or Delhi, it might just be your body's way of telling you it deserves better.