Work cannot compensate for unhappiness

Are you unhappy at home? Well, you are deluding yourself if you think work will make up for it, says a new study.

Researchers have carried out the study and found a link between how happy someone was in their personal life and how satisfied they were in their job.

But this did not extend to anyone attempting to use work to compensate for unhappiness in their personal life. Professor Yannis Georgellis at Kingston University in London, one of the researchers, said: “The life and work domains are definitely correlated. Happiness at home affects your job and vice versa.

“Although there is a clear ‘spillover’ effect from one area of life to the other, there is no evidence that people who are very unhappy at home will feel ‘compensated’ by work in any way.”The researchers came to the conclusion on an analysis of a survey of 10,000 people across 30 European countries and found that there was a weaker correlation between job and life satisfaction in richer nations. Prof Georgellis added: “The study finds that being happy at work becomes less important to women’s overall well-being when they have pre-school children.”