Well-being, which is sometimes also referred to as psychosocial well-being, is defined in different ways depending on who you ask. Psychologists have tended to define well-being in one of two ways.
First, it is thought to involve higher levels of positive emotions (and lower levels of negative emotions). Second, it is thought to include a general satisfaction with one’s life (Ryff & Keyes, 1995).
Why Is Well-Being Important?
Well-being is arguably one of the most important things in life. Indeed, Thomas Jefferson, one of the founding fathers of the United States, claimed that ‘the pursuit of happiness’ (or more accurately, the pursuit of a meaningful life) should be a human right.
In addition, it is also the desire to move towards greater well-being that motivates the majority of human behavior—everything from the jobs we work to the relationships we make to the hobbies we fill our time with. Well-being is the purpose of life, even though we define and experience well-being in an infinite number of ways.
Types of Well-Being
1. Emotional Well-Being
Emotional well-being is the aspect of well-being that involves our emotions and satisfaction with life (Langeland, 2022). When researchers talk about well-being, emotional well-being is usually what they are referring to. However, the lines are blurry in the research, and emotional well-being often also includes social and mental characteristics.
2. Social Well-Being
Social well-being is defined as our self-reported relationship quality with others. Interestingly, though, other aspects of social well-being depend upon how we compare ourselves to others (Keyes & Shapiro, 2004). For example, we evaluate and therefore form opinions of our well-being based on comparisons to neighbors, friends, and even people we see on TV. Therefore, we may report relatively higher (or lower) well-being depending on how well (or not well) others are doing. Letting go of these comparisons is a great first step in increasing our social well-being.
3. Mental Well-Being
Mental well-being—which might also be called cognitive well-being or intellectual well-being—has to do with the well-being of the mind. Again, there is an overlap between mental well-being and the other types of well-being, but poor mental well-being might involve things like rumination, minimizing, or suppression. On the flip side, positive mental well-being might include not getting caught up in negative thoughts, accepting our thoughts, and effectively processing our thoughts.
4. Financial Well-Being
Financial well-being is less often discussed as part of the science of well-being. This is a shame because finances have such a huge impact on personal well-being. In fact, one study showed that lottery winners showed sustained increases in well-being for over a decade (Lindqvist et al., 2020). However, the impact of money on well-being is not straightforward at all, and money doesn’t increase well-being in all circumstances (Diener & Biswas-Diener, 2002). Nevertheless, it’s clear that increasing income up to a certain amount ($75,000 in 2010 dollars) is correlated with parallel increases in well-being. Increasing income beyond this amount does not seem to influence well-being (Kahneman & Deaton, 2010).
5. Economic Well-Being
Economic well-being can be defined as the overall financial well-being of people in a given area. For example, per capita disposable real income may be used as a measure of economic well-being (Osbery, 1985). Economic growth of a nation appears to have little impact on well-being. However, poverty puts people at high risk for poor well-being (Diener & Biswas-Diener, 2002). This suggests that while alleviating poverty is quite important for well-being, money (or economic prosperity) is unlikely to increase the well-being of those not living in poverty.
6. Spiritual Well-Being
Although spiritual well-being is rarely the focus of research in the psychology field, aspects of spirituality overlap considerably with other areas of psychology, especially positive psychology. For example, one study defined spiritual well-being as having four parts. These parts were:
- Connection with self
- Connection with God
- Connection with the environment
- Connection with others
Although ‘connection with God’ was not correlated with well-being, the other three aspects were correlated with well-being (Gomez & Fisher, 2003).
7. Holistic Well-Being
Holistic well-being can be defined as the multidimensional concept of overall well-being that includes all the types of well-being described above (and perhaps a few others) (Chan et al., 2014). In the mainstream, holistic well-being is generally thought to be an approach to well-being that not only considers the many aspects of well-being but how they interact and affect each other. For example, poor social well-being is very likely to contribute to poor emotional well-being.
In Sum
Hopefully, you have a better sense of what well-being is and why it has become such a popular topic in the field of psychology. By building the skills that boost well-being, you might just wake up one day and realize that your life is completely different.
A version of this post also appears on berkeleywellbeing.com.
References
Chan, C. H., Chan, T. H., Leung, P. P., Brenner, M. J., Wong, V. P., Leung, E. K., … & Chan, C. L. (2014). Rethinking well-being in terms of affliction and equanimity: Development of a holistic well-being scale. Journal of Ethnic and Cultural Diversity in Social Work, 23(3-4), 289-308.
Diener, E., & Biswas-Diener, R. (2002). Will money increase subjective well-being?. Social indicators research, 57, 119-169.
Gomez, R., & Fisher, J. W. (2003). Domains of spiritual well-being and development and validation of the Spiritual Well-Being Questionnaire. Personality and individual differences, 35(8), 1975-1991.
Kahneman, D., & Deaton, A. (2010). High income improves evaluation of life but not emotional well-being. Proceedings of the national academy of sciences, 107(38), 16489-16493.
Keyes, C. L., & Shapiro, A. D. (2004). Social well-being in the United States: A descriptive epidemiology. How healthy are we, 350-372.
Langeland, E. (2022). Emotional well-being. In Encyclopedia of quality of life and well-being research (pp. 1-3). Cham: Springer International Publishing.
Lindqvist, E., Östling, R., & Cesarini, D. (2020). Long-run effects of lottery wealth on psychological well-being. The Review of Economic Studies, 87(6), 2703-2726.
Osberg, L. (1985). The measurement of economic well-being. University of Toronto Press.
Ryff, C. D., & Keyes, C. L. M. (1995). The structure of psychological well-being revisited. Journal of personality and social psychology, 69(4), 719.
—
This post was previously published on Psychology Today and is republished on Medium.
***
If you believe in the work we are doing here at The Good Men Project, please join us as a Premium Member today.
All Premium Members get to view The Good Men Project with NO ADS.
Need more info? A complete list of benefits is here.
Photo credit: iStock
