Unpacking wellbeing

Insurers have the potential to significantly enhance their offerings by embracing comprehensive wellbeing. Mutuals, in particular, could differentiate themselves by promoting a ‘membership means more’ message compared to proprietary firms.

But to ensure these initiatives are robust and serve a meaningful purpose we must thoroughly understand wellbeing, grounding it in formal research and scientific rigor.

Despite its formality and length, there’s also a personal aspect to this article. For years I struggled with the concept of wellbeing. What was it? Who and what was it good for? Could it help someone without any apparent mental or physical challenges? Could it be personal business as usual?

Where this article fits

This wellbeing article suggests one solution. A comprehensive wellbeing proposition has engagement designed in from outset. The real question: will protection insurers be involved?

The membership article argues that the nature of mutual membership should be reviewed. We suggest an enhanced membership offering would appeal to a wider demographic, foster long-term engagement and differentiate mutual versus proprietary insurers.

The engagement article suggests there is a major problem with lack of engagement of potential and actual customers with protection. We explain why the current protection offering and thinking means non-engagement is inevitable – almost mathematically so.

The Protection 3.0 article brings everything together into a people-centred insurer proposition.

How wellbeing fits into health

Most people have a good idea of what they mean by physical health, but the corresponding terminology for mental health is confusing, not helped by historic use by professionals.

Angharad de Cates, a clinical postdoctoral researcher, says:

“The mental wellbeing literature can be confusing as many similar-sounding terms are used interchangeably. The WHO definition of mental wellbeing is concerned exclusively with positive mental health states, and this approach is also evident in the way that terminology is used in UK policy documents. Nevertheless, it is sometimes unclear whether the term ‘mental well-being’ implies the absence of mental illness or distress.”
Source: Mental well-being: an important outcome for mental health services?

My placing of wellbeing is consistent with WHO and UK policy:

With this set up ‘mental wellbeing’ is identical to wellbeing. It is separate from (and does not imply the absence of) mental illness or distress (red). Green shows the potential for wellbeing to reduce mental illness and improve physical health.

Walkthrough

This is a long article. This is what I cover, section by section.

Serious science was my entry point. Thank you Andy McAleese for the Linkedin article and paper reference. That led me to Sonja Lyubomirsky and hedonic adaption. Then to positive psychology, Martin Seligman, learned helplessness, PERMA, the links between positivity and health and more.

Positive psychology is great way in to rigorous wellbeing. People have poured decades of their lives into this and I get to benefit. We provide the definition and core aim of positive psychology, together with its personalities and development over time.

Theories and components of wellbeing focuses on two wellbeing models: authentic happiness and PERMA, from Professor Martin Seligman. The Hope Circuit charts the development of his thinking.

Wellbeing developments and alternative theories lists several extensions of and alternatives to PERMA. Those which add physical health (PERMA+ and PERMAH) I don’t find convincing, but, given existing research, incorporating optimism explicitly could be interesting.

Two-dimensional mental health. Research suggests that mental health and (traditional) mental illness are not extremes on the same continuum, but rather different dimensions. Paradoxically a clinically depressed person could have higher wellbeing than someone with no mental illness.

Wellbeing and physical health are linked. Positive feelings, optimism and broader wellbeing impact mortality, Cardiovascular Disease (CVD) and Coronary Heart Disease (CHD). We detail research in these areas and causal mechanisms e.g. biomarkers.

Practical wellbeing turns wellbeing models into personal actions. After a BS warning from a professional, I suggest a charity and two books: 12 activities and 10 keys. All refer to (authentic) happiness rather than wellbeing, but there’s science rather than BS here.

Final lessons lists 13 insights based on positive psychology research only up until 2008. The author Christopher Peterson was the BS warning guy, so these “lessons” form a reality check on Positive Psychology’s wellbeing. Peterson died too young, but left a legacy. He said other people matter.

Serious science

Andy McAleese highlighted Pursuing Happiness: The Architecture of Sustainable Change.

This paper suggests that differences in people’s happiness are accounted for by three categories, with 40% effectively being under our control.

It also introduced me to hedonic adaptation, also known as the hedonic treadmill: people’s general tendency to return to a set level of happiness despite life’s ups and downs.

One of the paper’s authors was Sonja Lyubomirsky, who we’ll meet again.

A way in: Positive Psychology

As noted above, I’ve struggled with the concept of wellbeing. Insurers’ emphasis on physical health made commercial sense for them, but left me wanting more. Any mental health benefits also focused on those with poor mental health or even mental illness.

I sensed that comprehensive wellbeing should go beyond conventional health. It should be more than supporting those with physical and mental health challenges, important though this is.

Others had, of course, got there decades before me:

Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. Source: World Health Organization (WHO) 1946.

Positive Psychology concurs with this view for mental health. But Sigmund Freud (who also believed that happiness was an illusion) insisted mental health was just the absence of mental illness.

Consequently traditional psychotherapy was not designed to produce wellbeing, but to curtail misery. But positive psychology wants more:

“Positive psychology takes you through the countryside of pleasure and gratification, up into the high country of strength and virtue, and finally to the peaks of lasting fulfillment, meaning and purpose.” Source: Seligman, 2002

Positive psychology and wellbeing over time

Positive psychology’s development is linked to a widening understanding of wellbeing: a journey from pleasure or “mere happiness” to holistic wellbeing, usable for non-experts.

Of interest to protection insurers should be that health is not the opposite of illness and that Positive Psychology in a sense reverses the direction of travel of both psychology and protection.

Health is more than the absence of illness. Consistent with the WHO position, Positive Psychology focuses on strengths more than weaknesses. It builds rather than repairs.

Professors even speak of taking the lives of average people up to “great”, not focusing solely on moving those who are struggling up to “normal”.

Protection in reverse. Protection has focused on physical health, recently incorporating mental health. Conversely, positive psychology has recently explored the link between physical health and its specialism of mental health and wellbeing.

Positive psychology defined

Despite Greek roots, the term positive psychology was first used by Professor Martin Seligman in his 1998 presidential address to the American Psychological Association. Another of the founding fathers gave a great definition:

Positive psychology is a scientific approach to studying human thoughts, feelings, and behavior, with a focus on strengths instead of weaknesses, building the good in life instead of repairing the bad, and taking the lives of average people up to “great” instead of focusing solely on moving those who are struggling up to “normal”.
Source: Prof Christopher Peterson – What Is Positive Psychology, What Is It Not?

In 2000, dissatisfied with the downside emphasis of traditional psychology, Professors Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi said:

The exclusive focus on pathology that has dominated so much of our discipline results in a model of the human being lacking the positive features that make life worth living.

Instead they were aiming:

… to improve quality of life and prevent the pathologies that arise when life is barren and meaningless. Source: Positive Psychology: An Introduction

Interestingly this was to be achieved through a science of positive subjective experience, positive individual traits and positive institutions. That still sounds important almost 25 years later.

Csikszentmihalyi had, in 1989, developed the concept of flow, a concept describing those moments of complete absorption in a challenging but doable task. Busy guys.

Theories and components of wellbeing

The Hope Circuit (2019) is Seligman’s account of the development of his thinking over time.

Traditional theories of happiness

Seligman and Royzman wrote a note on three traditional theories of happiness (Hedonism Theory, Desire Theory and Objective List Theory) and linking them to authentic happiness (below).

They argue the individual components and theories above are not enough:

• Hedonism. In wishing someone a happy life (or childhood, or week) we are looking at the whole picture, including the distribution of pleasure, rather than the minutiae or total pleasure.
• Desire. The objection is a “common sense” one. To quote “The world’s largest collection of tea cups, no matter how ‘satisfying,’ does not seem to add up to much of a happy life.”

Authentic happiness (2002)

The Authentic Happiness book was written because:

The time has finally arrived for a science that seeks to understand positive emotion, build strength and virtue and provide guideposts for finding what Aristotle called “the good life”.
Source: Seligman Authentic Happiness preface

Authentic happiness has three components:

Seligman explains the value of factors: they avoid monism, in which all human motives come down to just one: “I detest the word happiness, which is so overused that it has become almost meaningless: it is an unworkable term for science or for any practical goal.” Including becoming happier(!)

Reflecting the critique of the traditional theories, each of the authentic happiness components is strengthened: not just pleasure (hedonism) but joy, awe and contentment, not just getting what you want (desire) but being consumed by the activity, perhaps ruling out tea cups.

Seligman suggests that positive emotion and engagement are subjective. I’m not so sure; I’d expect people with brain activity monitoring expertise to be able to say whether subjects were happy and/or engaged. That may, of course, remain somewhat theoretical for now.

The third is labelled “at least partly objective”. That seems right.

Authentic happiness (which Seligman equated to Positive Psychology) was always intended to be practical:

“So Positive Psychology takes seriously the bright hope that if you find yourself stuck in the parking lot of life, with few and only ephemeral pleasures, with minimal gratifications, and without meaning there is a way out. Source: Seligman Authentic Happiness preface

and more:

This road takes you through the countryside of pleasure and gratification, up into the high country of strength and virtue, and finally to the peaks of lasting fulfillment, meaning and purpose.” Source: Seligman, 2002 and Authentic Happiness preface

Sounds promising doesn’t it? But it can be lost in the words. What is pleasure versus gratification? How can we boost them? Clarifications were provided:

Traits are negative or positive characteristics that recur across time and situations. Exercising your traits makes corresponding feeling more likely: the negative trait of paranoia makes jealousy more likely, while the positive trait of being humourous makes laughing more likely.

Strengths and virtues are positive characteristics that recur across time and situations. Research has identified 24 character strengths.

Seligman explains that, with coaching and practice, he has learned how to chair a meeting effectively, eliminating a weakness. But the experience leaves him “drained, not invigorated” and “does not put me in touch with myself or anything larger”.

There seems to be an implicit recommendation: put some effort into weaknesses, so you don’t embarrass yourself, but focus on your strengths.

Wellbeing theory: PERMA (2011)

Prefer watching to reading? Watch Seligman’s 25 minutes on PERMA.

The problems with Authentic Happiness

After a challenge from a student in his 2005 MAPP course Seligman became convinced that Authentic Happiness was an inadequate theory. Excellent: that’s how science advances.

Authentic happiness had three problems.

Problem 1: The connotation of happiness. The publisher insisted on happiness, but critics have said that dragging in engagement and meaning into happiness is arbitrary. In more practical terms happiness is inextricably linked with being cheerful.

A cheerful mood is not what Positive Psychology or authentic happiness was supposed to be about. Over-use of “happiness” also means we also have to be on guard about whether by happiness someone means positive emotion or the whole happiness model.

Problem 2: The correlation of life satisfaction and mood. Authentic happiness was measured by Diener’s satisfaction with life scale. But it turns out that people take a short term view: your mood and current judgement determines 70% of your life satisfaction score – close to monism.

That’s a human bias and a problem for any theory which seeks to go beyond mood and short term happiness. People who struggle to be cheerful can nonetheless find flow and meaning. Simply taking a “glass half full” person’s downbeat assessment can lead to bad decisions for society.

Problem 3: Not enough factors. Positive emotion, engagement and meaning were included in model because people choose to engage in corresponding activities “for their own sake”, rather than to obtain happiness per se; you listen to a child practising violin because it’s the right thing to do.

So PERMA introduced two new elements: accomplishment and relationships. The first was motivated not just by Seligman’s student, but by the Motivation Reconsidered (1959) article, previously thought heretical: “White, as I discovered in my own long and winding road, was right on target.”

Accomplishment. People seek success and mastery for its own sake. For example, some seem to aim simply to accumulate wealth, while others use the second half of life to distribute much of theirs: think Carnegie, Rockefeller, Wellcome, Gates and Buffett.

A curiosity: This article suggests that Carnegie and Rockefeller were wealthier than today’s super-rich and dictators were wealthier still. Happily there’s more to life than money!

Relationships. Seligman notes that most areas of “indescribable joy” involve others and that interacting with other people is the best antidote to the “downs” of life. He admits a little doubt as to whether relationships are pursued “for their own sake”, but offers two evolutionary arguments.

The PERMA solution

Flourish (2011) introduced a five-component model of wellbeing, with new items in bold:

With my protection hat on, the new components align with (my conception of) modern membership.

PERMA model happiness (positive emotion) is directly measurable: a “real thing”. Wellbeing, like freedom is not a real thing; it is a construct measurable only via its defined components. For more detail see An Introduction to the PERMA Model.

Summarising one change between authentic happiness and PERMA:

Happiness and life satisfaction, as subjective measures, are now demoted from being the goal of the entire theory to being one of the factors included under the element of positive emotion. Source: Seligman in Flourish.

Technical aside: Model components are sometimes said to be “independent”. Independent variables in statistical models may overlap: while accomplishments in (e.g.) bridge may bring flow but not meaning, other activities may bring (e.g.) meaning and relationships.

H for health didn’t make it into PERMA, but Flourish has a chapter “Positive Physical Health: The Biology Of Optimism” and the implications for physical health are examined below.

Wellbeing developments and alternative theories

PERMA+

PERMA was soon extended.

Yet wellbeing goes beyond just these five elements, and the + can include other important areas we well, such as optimism, nutrition, physical activity and sleep. These are areas equally important to wellbeing. Source: Seligman’s PERMA+ Model Explained (adjusted).

My adjustments. The original text has “happiness” instead of the first instance of wellbeing and “mental wellbeing” instead of the second occurrence. For me this captures the essence of what PERMA+ is about and I apologize if I have not captured their intent.

My verdict. Just conceptually I wouldn’t be keen to incorporate physical items such as nutrition, physical activity and sleep into what’s essentially a mental wellbeing model. I do like the idea of incorporating optimism: it’s mental and has been investigated. MOPERA?

PERMAH

PERMA incorporates mental health and perhaps more, but oddly there was no explicit mention of physical health. PositivePsychology acknowledged this in a 2016 article:

… the extended PERMAH model has proven popular and effective, particularly in educational and workplace settings, where it can be predictive of wellness and performance. Source: Positive Psychology Theory (2016).

My verdict. I don’t buy this. The actual coverage of PERMAH in the article is minimal. I think this is a model which is going to die, even if it currently exists.

Alternative theories

The 2016 article also noted that the following theories each contribute to the research and application of positive psychology while emphasizing specific elements of the PERMA model:

Hope theory seems promising, linking accomplishment and hope, a.k.a. “realistic optimism”.

Hope is like a snap-shot of a person’s current goal-directed thinking, highlighting the motivated pursuit of goals and the expectation that those goals can be achieved.

Christopher Peterson’s Strengths theory is “much too hard” (Seligman). Further progress may be hard, especially without Peterson. Despite this it is surely promising do the 24 character strengths indeed enable PERMA progress?

Flow theory. Emphasizes one aspect of PERMA: E for engagement. Going back as far as 1989, you can hardly say flow theory is a bad thing. But why not meaning theory also?

Resilience theory covers something important – how to cope with inevitable setbacks. I see it as a complement rather than a rival to PERMA.

A comprehensive survey

A global study, covering more than 98% of the world’s population concluded that wellbeing had five categories essential to most people:

• Physical. Do you enough health and energy for daily activities?
• Financial. Are you effectively managing your economic life?
• Community. Do you engage with the area where you live?
• Social. Do you have strong relationships and love in your life?
• Career. Do you enjoy how you occupy your time (work or other)?

Gallup found that 66% of people are doing well in at least one of these areas, meaning that about a third were not doing well in any area. Just 7% were thriving in all five.

Two-dimensional mental health

Mental well-being: an important outcome for mental health services? says mental health is probably two-dimensional, rather than different ends of the same continuum:

The 2007 Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey (APMS) … findings were consistent with those from other studies that indicate that mental wellbeing is more than just the absence of mental illness symptoms and distress, and that (although correlated) mental well-being and mental distress are independent of one another. The APMS findings also showed that at least moderately high levels of well-being may be achieved in the context of mental illness.

It’s the independent (I’d say distinct, given the correlation) that means mental health is two-dimensional. There’s evidence from 20 years ago too. In Mental Illness and/or Mental Health? (2004) Corey Keyes concluded:

The current study confirms empirically that mental health and mental illness are not opposite ends of a single continuum; rather, they constitute distinct but correlated axes.

In the Keyes classification subjective wellbeing (SWB) was taken as a measure of mental health while mental illness (MI) as measured by (e.g.) a major depressive episode, generalized anxiety, panic disorder etc was postulated (and demonstrated) to be a separate dimension.

Keyes uses “positive function”, not mental illness. This means the best (flourishing) state is high/high. If we used mental illness the best result would be the more confusing high/low.

In concluding remarks Keyes noted:

Mental illness when combined with languishing was markedly worse than a pure form of mental illness.

That not surprising perhaps. More striking is his comment on low/high versus high/low when converted into overall functional ability:

… pure languishing was as dysfunctional (sometimes more) than pure mental illness …

Finally Keyes adds:

A recent study confirmed the hypothesis that the complete mental health diagnostic states were independent risk factors for cardiovascular disease.

So the two dimensions of mental health might have a physical health impact. Could positive wellbeing have a protective effect on physical health?

Wellbeing and physical health

Lest you think all this Positive Psychology and wellbeing is lacking in hard edge this section delves into something familiar, important to governments and potentially lucrative for insurers: the impact of mental wellbeing on physical health.

We’ll look at so-called positive affect (PA, the positive feeling comprising the first element of authentic happiness and PERMA wellbeing), optimism and wellbeing more broadly. There have been studies on the impact on mortality, CVD, CHD and even the impact on biomarkers.

Physical health take 1: positive affect

Does positive affect influence health? (2005)
Pressman and Cohen’s 2005 paper is said to be seminal. Their review included approximately 70 studies of health outcomes e.g. mortality, morbidity, survival after disease diagnosis and pain, as well as over 100 studies on physiological outcomes.

The authors found that positive affect (PA) was associated with reduced mortality at older ages and reduced morbidity more generally. For those already with “end stage” disease PA didn’t help. But earlier stages either benefited or had no negative effect.

Possible explanations for those with earlier stage disease included adherence to medical regimens and other behavioral factors (e.g. exercise, better sleep).

We might expect positives under a fuller PERMA-like wellbeing framework to result in greater effects than the more transient PA alone; other areas may better link personal action (e.g. medical compliance) and lead away from feeling of helplessness.

Positive emotion word use and longevity in famous deceased psychologists
A 2012 paper from Pressman and Cohen uses an idea, not unique to the authors: rather than rely in surveys (which the dead and famous don’t take) look at their published words:

Positive Affect and Health (2019)
The Pressman et al 2019 meta-analysis concluded that PA was associated with reduced risk of mortality and morbidity.

The paper refers in its introduction to there being a “surge in research” tackling the link between happiness and health after Pressman’s 2005 work. Their research notes:

PA matters more for health in later stages of life, when chronic disease processes are more relevant and PA has the ability to alter mechanisms that lead to changes in these processes.

Physical health take 2: optimism

Purpose in Life as a Predictor of Mortality Across Adulthood
The 5-page 2014 Psychological Science paper (Hill and Turiano) takes the research beyond PA: the authors focused instead on emotional and psychological wellbeing.

Along with purpose (PERMA’s “M for meaning”) the research also incorporated three psycho-social variables: relationships (PERMA’s R), positive affect (PERMA’s P) and negative affect. The authors thereby captured 3 of the 5 PERMA factors. As I hoped, the results seem powerful.

The four conclusions:

1. The sample was more representative, using a greater age range than previous work.
2. The purpose effect could not be explained by other psychological factors, including PA.
3. In contrast to PA, a purpose in life can be as important at younger as older ages.
4. Benefits of purpose are not conditional on retirement status.

Physical health take 3: Positive Psychology wellbeing

Positive Physical Health
Hope Circuit has a chapter Physical Health, explaining Seligman’s work over 2007-2017.

Paul Tarini of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the largest American philanthropic organization focused solely on health. Impressed with Seligman’s work, Tarini wanted Seligman to create a field of Positive Health, to explore potential protective factors related to wellbeing.

One part of the project reviewed around 20 major studies of optimism and heart disease. The result was the paper The Heart’s Content: The Association Between Positive Psychological Well-Being and Cardiovascular Health (Boehm and Kubzansky, 2012).

Positive Psychological Well-Being (PPWB) and Cardiovascular disease (CVD)
This research covered both healthy lives and patients.

Wellbeing was split into three types. Eudaimonic wellbeing is typically defined as fulfilling one’s potential and identifying meaningful life pursuits, emphasizing thinking and doing. By contrast, hedonic wellbeing refers to the pursuit of pleasure and happiness, emphasizing feeling.

The categories have various “constructs” for which definitions and measures were provided in the paper.

Potential effects are shown by arrows. Categories and constructs can act on biological functions (e.g. cardiovascular, inflammatory, and metabolic processes) and behaviours (e.g. smoking, alcohol consumption, physical activity, sleep and food). For CVD, especially, the action may be via stress.

Arrows show (potential) effects. Importantly – especially as the area of interest is CVD – wellbeing categories and constructs may act via stress, or more directly via:

• biological functions (e.g. cardiovascular, inflammatory, and metabolic processes)
• behaviours (regarding e.g. smoking, alcohol, physical activity, sleep and food)
• behaviours (regarding e.g. smoking, alcohol, physical activity, sleep and food)

The paper found that:

• PPWB protects against CVD, independently of traditional risk factors and ill-being.
• PPWB is also positively associated with restorative health behaviors and biological function.
• Optimism is most robustly associated with a reduced risk of cardiovascular events.

and, breaking down PPWB, we have a slightly counter-intuitive:

• Cardiovascular health is more consistently associated with optimism and hedonic wellbeing than with eudaimonic wellbeing. This could be due in part to more limited evidence being available concerning eudaimonic wellbeing.

These findings seem both interesting and impressive.

More specific conditions within CVD were also investigated, particularly coronary heart disease (CHD) and stroke. Stunning results were obtained from existing health initiatives:

• Best quartile for optimism have 30% fewer deaths than the worst.
• Optimism mattered more for preventing heart disease than smoking.
• But less so, if at all, for cancer and infectious diseases

Seligman suggests pessimism may lead to difficulty relaxing – recall the stress aspect of the PPWB model above. This may remain speculative today, but Seligman suggested that the Penn Resilience Program may be a cost-effective intervention.

Interesting implementations include:

• A limited implementation in a UK primary school
• A Coursera course – led by Penn’s Karen Reivich

Seligman refers to research beyond his group and project. Here’s one example.

Positive Psychology interventions (PPIs) and their effects on risk biomarkers
This 2016 research examined three different PPIs and concluded:

… this initial trial offers the first suggestion that PPIs might be effective in reducing risk biomarkers in high-risk cardiac patients.
Source: Effects of PPIs on Risk Biomarkers in Coronary Patients (Nikrahan et al, 2016).

The US army’s PDE

Until the 2010s researchers had “cobbled together” previous studies with limited data on psychological factors. What if instead there was a longitudinal study of hundreds of thousands of healthy individuals, with measures of health, illness and potentially protective factors?

The US Army’s Person-Event Data Environment (PDE) is an upgrade(!)

The PDE represents more than 100 times the population size and many times the number of linked variables covered by the nation’s leading sources of population health data.
Source: The U.S. Army PDE: A Military–Civilian Big Data Enterprise

explaining further that:

This unparalleled opportunity was necessitated by a growing need to learn more about relations between psychological and health assets and health outcomes, including healthcare utilization and costs—issues of major importance for both military and civilian population health. Source: The U.S. Army PDE: A Military–Civilian Big Data Enterprise

Practical wellbeing

Mixing the scientific and practical

Professor Peterson suggests this is where we need to take care, warning us: “Anyone who promises the secret to happiness or six easy steps to bliss should trigger a BS detector”.

So there are charlatans and some of them want us to pay for their secret recipes. On the other hand we can’t work with the purely abstract. Improving our lives needs more than the PERMA model.

The How of Happiness

Good news. Lyubomirsky also wrote the accessible The How of Happiness, examining the prospects of stepping off the hedonic treadmill. Seligman – he of positive psychology – said the book was “the right place to look for science-based advice on how to become happier.” Others agree:

“Everyone has an opinion about happiness, and unfortunately, many of them write books. Finally we have a self-help book from a reputable scientist whose advice is based on the best experimental data. Charlatans, pundits, and new-age gurus should be worried and the rest of us should be grateful.” Source: Daniel Gilbert, Harvard professor of psychology.

The book starts with three chapters providing rationale and scientific background. Six chapters then recommend twelve activities. Each activity “votes for” exactly two others. An Amazon-like “if you liked this activity you might like to try these.”

In summary:

Eudaimonic wellbeing gets good coverage: flow (chapter 8), accomplishment (chapter 10) and one form of meaning (chapter 11). The content emphasizes the “activities” (40% in her paper) not the momentary pleasures. The helpful patterns on thinking and behaviour. Do read it!

Action for Happiness

What happens when you combine authors, academics and a charity?

Final lessons

Lessons from Positive Psychology

In What Is Positive Psychology and Why Is It Important Chris Peterson outlined the theories and concepts that have resulted from positive psychology research up until 2008.

These can act as a reality check on from Positive Psychology’s wellbeing.

1. For the most part, most people are happy.
2. Happiness is one of the causes of the good things in life, and in turn promotes more happiness.
3. Most people are pretty resilient.
4. Happiness, character strengths, and good social relationships act as buffers against disappointments and setbacks.
5. Crises reveal character.
6. Other people matter, in terms of what makes life worth living.
7. Religion and/or spirituality matters.
8. Work also matters in terms of making life worth living, as long as we are engaged and draw meaning and purpose from it.
9. Money has diminishing returns on our happiness after a certain point, but we can buy some happiness by spending money on other people.
10. Eudaimonia (wellbeing, deeper form of satisfaction than happiness) is more important than hedonism (sole focus on pleasure and positive emotions) for living the good life.
11. The “heart” matters more than the “head”. This mean things like empathy and compassion are just as important as critical thinking.
12. Nearly all good days have three things in common: a sense of autonomy, competence, and connection to others.
13. The good life can be taught.

Positive psychology has its emphasis and it is, by construction … positive. But there are other other perspectives. Some mental health trends (e.g.) with UK younger people are troubling.

Seligman: belief and frustration

Not surprisingly, Seligman is a true believer in the work of positive psychology:

Given the size of optimism’s protective effects (they are rather larger than those of not smoking), their consistency (every single study shows that optimism protects), and how readily pessimism can be turned toward optimism, I’ve been advocating a major study of training optimism to prevent cardiovascular disease and death.

and

A very substantial literature makes a compelling case that happy people live longer and that happiness influences longevity. Literally scores of meticulous studies in psychology journals document this, and there are almost no exceptions.

But he is also hugely frustrated:

… and positive health’s inability to penetrate conventional medical thinking and its journals is the single most frustrating obstacle in my scientific career… So I here want to complain publicly about the leading medical journals. Psychologists are unwelcome interlopers in the world of medical science.

The “complain publicly” was in part motivated by his assessment of the (lack of) quality of 2016 research published in The Lancet: Happiness and unhappiness have no direct effect on mortality. The LA Times published significant methodology critique by a trio of renowned scientists.

There’s been a lot about Martin Seligman in this article. The Journal of Positive Psychology dedicated a full issue to celebrating his 80th birthday. The issue’s introduction said:

Marty feels called to positive psychology. He describes this calling in spiritual and even mystical terms. Martin Seligman: answering the call to help others

Positive Psychology and Seligman have their detractors. But also admirers:

At 80, Marty hasn’t slowed down at all. I personally know no one who has done more to improve the human condition. Realizing human potential (Paul Rozin, 2022)

That’s not a bad place to end this article.

Resources

PositivePsychology.com

The PositivePsychology.com team is headed by an entreprenur, back they’ve a stack of PhDs between them. I take that as a good thing.

• What Is Positive Psychology and Why Is It Important?
• The 5 Founding Fathers and A History of Positive Psychology
• Positive Psychology and well-being
• What is mental wellbeing?
• PERMA model
• What Is The Good Life & How To Attain It?
• Hedonic vs. Eudaimonic Wellbeing: How to Reach Happiness

Positive work from PositivePsychology.com

Much sense if that a huge proportion of mental health challenges relate to workplace cultures. The signs are not good, for employer as much as employees:

• Almost 2m British workers reported work-related ill health in 2022/23 (HSE)
• Ten workplace mental health statistics for 2023 (MHFA)
• 20% of workers needed time off work due to stress in the past year (Mental Health UK)
• Mental health is behind 60%+ of those planning to leave jobs (Deloitte UK)
• Cost to employers increased to £ 56bn in 2020-21 (Deloitte UK)

It’s clear: from early in their careers the generation after me places much more emphasis on life satisfaction and work’s contribution to it: money is losing its power. Employers beware.

Here are some ideas from PositivePsychology.com:

• Wellbeing at Work: 24 Ideas for a Healthier Workplace
• How to Build Your Workplace Wellness Program

Practical wellbeing: books and more

I’m strongly in the Seligman camp on “happiness”. The good news is that, despite the H word being everywhere below, the other PERMA elements also get targeted – see the chapter titles not just the book titles. Eudaimonic wellbeing gets a good emphasis.

• The How of Happiness is a readable account from Sonja Lyubomirsky.
• The How, Why, What, When, and Who of Happiness Her chapter from another book.
• Beyond happiness The trap of happiness and how to find deeper meaning and joy.
• Action for happiness The UK charity AfH.
• 10 keys to happier living Author Vanessa King is on the AfH team.

Other: UK’s National Health Service

• NHS: Elements of Health and Wellbeing
• NHS: Improving personal health and wellbeing