People ‘happier when drinking alcohol’

New research has revealed people are “happier at the moment of drinking alcohol” – but the effects are transient and not linked to long-term satisfaction.

An app called Mappiness, created by the London School of Economics, surveyed 31,000 users on their happiness at random points several times a day, on a scale of 1 to 100, also taking key information such as who they were with and what they were doing.

The results revealed that when users were drinking, their happiness increased by 10.79 points. Since drinking often occurs during enjoyable events, researches controlled for those outside factors, still reporting a “significant” increase of 4 points – a “strong and consistent moment-to-moment relationship between happiness and drinking events”.

Interestingly, the results showed that drinking had the “greatest impact” when it occurred alongside otherwise unenjoyable activities such as commuting and waiting, and only increased the happiness of already enjoyable activities such as socialising “by smaller amounts”.

However, while drinking alcohol did boost happiness in the short term, it was not shown to make users more content in the long term.

The team discovered “no significant relationship between changing drinking levels and changing life satisfaction, but a negative association with developing drinking problems”.

Researchers said there are “surprisingly few discussions” of the link between wellbeing and alcohol consumption, typically spurring policymakers to “consider negative wellbeing impacts while ignoring positive ones”.

The report concludes: “While iPhone users are happier at the moment of drinking, there are only small overspills to other moments, and among the wider population, changing drinking levels across several years are not associated with changing life satisfaction.

“Furthermore, drinking problems are associated with lower life satisfaction. Simple accounts of the wellbeing impacts of alcohol policies are therefore likely to be misleading.

“Policymakers must consider the complexity of different policy impacts on different conceptions of ‘wellbeing’, over different time periods, and among different types of drinkers.”