Sarcasm is now officially bad for one’s health.

Apparently, research conducted by the University of Tennessee researchers found that people with more ‘hostile traits’ tend to die because of a second heart attack.

The study essentially found that being sarcastic, easily irritable or consistently being in a negative emotional state can put a strain on one’s health and heart specifically.

In today’s time, being sarcastic and having a very pessimistic view of the world and society, in general, is extremely common to see.

People use memes and sarcastic comments to deal with various bad things happening on a local, regional and global level. They also often tend to gravitate towards such measures while dealing with personal, individual issues too.

However, there seems to be a reason why being overly sarcastic is not good for one’s health.

What Does The Research Say?

According to research recently published in the European Journal of Cardiovascular Nursing, a journal of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC), it was stated that people who had sarcastic or irritable traits could be putting their health at risk.

These traits are further dangerous for heart attack patients or people who had suffered from a heart attack once before.

Dr. Tracey Vitori of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, US, who is a study author in this research, stated that “Hostility is a personality trait that includes being sarcastic, cynical, resentful, impatient or irritable. It’s not just a one-off occurrence but characterises how a person interacts with people. We know that taking control of lifestyle habits improves the outlook for heart attack patients and our study suggests that improving hostile behaviours could also be a positive move.”

In the study, the researchers kept track of around 2,300 heart attack survivors and found that people displaying traits like:

  • sarcasm,
  • cynicism,
  • resentment,
  • impatience or
  • irritability

and more were at an increased rate of dying from a second heart attack within the next two years.


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The researchers believe that this is due to the strain that such negative emotional states can put on one’s health.

It was also found that people who were quite hostile to others also indulged in lifestyle choices harmful to health like poor diet, drinking, smoking and more.

The patients were followed for a period of 24 months, at the end of which their survival rate was compared to the score they had gotten for a personality quiz taken at the beginning of the study.

In this comparison, hostility was seen as an accurate way to predict the chances of a person dying from a second heart attack.

They wrote in the report that, “Hostile individuals have increased clotting times, higher adrenaline levels, above normal cholesterol and triglyceride levels, and increased cardiac reactivity,” and further added that, “These known inflammatory factors may initiate cardiac events and increase poor clinical outcomes.”

It has previously also been proven that having a more optimistic outlook has a direct effect on one’s health.

Being optimistic can lead to a reduction of stress hormones, blood pressure and pulse rate. It also makes people take better care of their health by being more active and conscious of their diet.

Well, that’s it, how are we supposed to deal with all the bad things going on around us, if we cannot brush it away with sarcastic comments?


Image Credits: Google Images

Sources: Telegraph, Science Daily, Independent 

Find the blogger @chirali_08

This post is tagged under: Being Sarcastic Not Good, heart attack, heart attack death, death, sarcastic death, millennials, heart attack patients, Being Sarcastic Not Good for health, sarcasm not good for health, millennials sarcastic, millennials health


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