Think you want to win the Mega Millions? Well, we’ve all heard the horror stories of lotto winners quickly going off the rails. So should you throw away your ticket? Let’s take a look at the medical literature.

Attention all Powerball players waiting to win your first billion in Tuesday night’s epic Mega Millions drawing: Stop before it’s too late! Winning may kill you! Or it might make you unhappy. Or it might make you overspend on cars and helicopters and lead you to early, penniless death.

That’s the well-turned schadenfreude narrative regarding the dismal life of lottery winners—that they blow their dough, they get divorced, they drink too much and snort too much cocaine. Their family starts to feud. They become legendary not for their generosity and jovial enjoyment of life on Easy Street, but as reps from the Department of Fractured American Dreams, a territory without real borders.

Indeed, much of the lay press, it would seem that any lottery winner ought to just give up immediately, walk slowly from his house, hands over his head, and be placed into custody. The disasters appear endless, including the need to deal with intrusive demanding family members, scam-a-minute ex-best-friends, seductive investments, and all the rest.

What’s a winner to do? Well, it might help to read the medical literature. The first solid study of Mega Millions lottery winners is a few decades old (PDF) but its conclusions are quite clear. Dr. Roy Kaplan, in the 1980s, published an article in the Journal of Gambling Behavior—and yes, absolutely, playing lottery is a form, however mild, of gambling—in which he asked more than 2,000 lottery winners from 12 states to complete a questionnaire.

He received information from 576 winners, each of whom had won between $50,000 and a million bucks. And he found that, contrary to the popular belief already well-rooted three decades ago, lottery winners mostly were a calm, satisfied, and well-balanced crowd. “Individuals with psychologically and financially rewarding jobs continued working regardless of the amount they won,” Kaplan wrote.

Rather than buying family dioramas made of gold, most expenditures actually were for “houses, automobiles, and trips.”  His conclusion was that “overall, winners were well-adjusted, secure, and generally happy from the experience.” This story on winning the Mega Millions originally appeared on The Daily Beast.