Well-Being

1What is a good life?

Ask people what a good life is and you will hear two kinds of answer. A young tailor in Musanze might say: "Enjoying each day: good food, music, laughing with friends." A retired teacher who now mentors a youth club might say: "Being useful. Seeing the young people I helped go further than I did." (Both are illustrative.) The first answer is about feeling good; the second is about living well. Psychologists study both, and the evidence about what actually makes people's lives go well is often surprising.

21. Two traditions: hedonic and eudaimonic

The two overlap: people with a sense of purpose usually also report more positive emotion. Martin Seligman (2011) combined them in the PERMA model: Positive emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning and Accomplishment.

32. Mental health is more than the absence of mental illness

Corey Keyes (2002, 2005) found in large American surveys that mental illness and mental well-being are related but separate dimensions: the dual-continua model (Figure 1). Many people with no diagnosis were languishing, and languishing itself predicted later problems, such as more missed work days. Equally, a person who lives with a mental health condition, such as well-managed depression or bipolar disorder, can have strong relationships, purpose and growth. This links back to Unit 5: health is not only the absence of disease.

Figure 1. The dual-continua model (after Keyes, 2002 and 2005). Mental illness and mental well-being are two different dimensions: having a diagnosis does not rule out flourishing, and having no diagnosis does not guarantee it.

Screening tools reflect this. The WHO-5 Well-Being Index asks five questions about the past two weeks (for example, "I have felt cheerful and in good spirits"). A low score is not a diagnosis, but it is a signal to talk to a health worker.

43. What predicts well-being, and what doesn't

• Relationships. The Harvard Study of Adult Development has followed the same men since 1938, later adding their wives and children. Its directors (Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz, 2023) conclude that the warmth of close relationships is one of the strongest predictors of both happiness and health in later life. Limitation: the original sample was American men only, and the findings are correlational.
• Money. Income matters most for people who are poor: escaping poverty raises well-being. Above that, extra income brings smaller gains. Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton (2010) reported that day-to-day emotional well-being stopped rising above an annual income of about US$75,000 in the United States, but Matthew Killingsworth (2021) found it kept rising. The two sides then ran a joint study (Killingsworth, Kahneman and Mellers, 2023): for most people happiness keeps rising with income, but for the unhappiest fifth it levels off. A good example of scientists resolving a disagreement.
• Adaptation. People adjust to many changes, good and bad, more than they expect, a process called hedonic adaptation. Philip Brickman and colleagues (1978) famously reported that lottery winners were not much happier than other people a year later. But the study was small (22 winners), and later long-term surveys (Lucas, 2007) show that adaptation is often incomplete after events such as long-term unemployment or severe disability.
• Genes. Twin studies suggest that roughly a third of the differences between people in well-being are linked to genetic differences (Bartels, 2015). Popular books once claimed that "40% of happiness is under your control"; that figure came from a faulty calculation and should not be quoted (Brown and Rohrer, 2020).

54. Can well-being be increased?

Positive psychology interventions, such as writing down three good things each evening or writing a gratitude letter, have been tested in many trials. Meta-analyses (Bolier and others, 2013) found small benefits, and a re-analysis correcting for small, weak studies found the benefits were smaller still (White and others, 2019). Larger, more reliable gains come from the basics in the last lesson: physical activity, sleep and close relationships. A practical summary, drawn up from the evidence for the UK government's Foresight project by the New Economics Foundation (2008), is the Five Ways to Wellbeing: connect, be active, take notice, keep learning and give.

Resilience is far more common than once thought. Ann Masten (2001) called it "ordinary magic": it usually comes not from rare personal qualities but from ordinary protective resources, such as a caring adult, a supportive school, problem-solving skills and a sense of hope. This is why a single caring teacher or relative can matter so much in a young person's life.