Psychological well-being: what it is, and how to raise it

This programme is free to read and does not replace care. It describes psychological well-being and what makes it vary in people who are not going through an acute episode. If you recognise yourself in sadness present nearly every day for more than two weeks, anxiety that organises your life, use you no longer control, or if you are thinking about dying, well-being work is not what you need first: you need an appointment, this week. Section 18 explains why the distinction matters.

1. Before you start

You are not unwell. That is exactly what is hard to say: you function, you meet your commitments, nobody is worried about you. And yet the days resemble each other, the drive is missing, you feel you are waiting for something without knowing what. Or everything is objectively fine and you cannot enjoy it.

This text is made for that situation — and also for the simpler question: what actually makes a life go well, and what can I act on?

It contains one idea best said straight away: being well is not the absence of being unwell. These are two different dimensions, measured separately for twenty years, and you can be high or low on each independently. That is what explains being without disorder and without drive — a state that has a name, and that can be worked on.

Who it is for

Anyone who wants to understand what psychological well-being is and what it rests on. It is useful whether you are doing well, middling, or coming out of a hard period.

It is not a treatment. If a disorder is present, it is treated in its own right, and that is in fact the condition for what follows to become applicable.

How it is built

There are four parts, and they are meant to be read in order.

Part I — What it is (sections 2 to 6). The definition, the two faces of well-being, what it is not, why mental health and mental illness are two distinct axes, and what actually makes it vary.

Part II — The six levers (sections 7 to 13). One lever per section. These are the six domains on which the evidence converges, from the most powerful to the most subtle.

Part III — Putting it into practice (sections 14 to 17). Locate yourself, pick one lever, hold it for six weeks — and know what does not work.

Part IV — The limits (sections 18 to 22). When well-being is not the right aim, the trap of compulsory happiness, and what you can expect.

Allow a good half hour of reading.

What this programme does not do

It does not promise happiness. The word will barely appear, because it means too many things at once to be useful.

It will not ask you to be positive. Several sections explain, on the contrary, why the obligation to be well degrades well-being, and why accepting unpleasant emotions is part of the solution.

And it will not hide the disappointing results. Some of the most widely shared exercises have real but small effects, smaller than advertised, and sometimes indistinguishable from zero once publication bias is corrected. Section 16 is devoted to them.

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2. Psychological well-being, in two minutes

The word is used everywhere and rarely means the same thing twice. In research it has a precise content, and it fits in one sentence.

Psychological well-being is the combination of two things: what you feel — more pleasure and satisfaction than distress — and how you function — having connections, meaning, autonomy and the sense of being equal to your life.

An example says it better than a definition.

Two people have the same day: decent work, an ordinary dinner, a series in the evening. The first saw a friend at lunchtime, finished something that mattered to her, and went to bed thinking the week was moving forward. The second made the same movements without getting anything from them: nobody to talk to, nothing finished, no link between what she does and what matters to her.

Neither is ill. The gap between them is exactly what this text calls well-being — and it is not decided by mood, it is decided by what the day contains.

The distinction that counts

Two research traditions coexist, and they measure two different things.

Feeling good. This is so-called subjective well-being: satisfaction with your life, the frequency of pleasant emotions, the rarity of unpleasant ones. It is measured by short questionnaires, and it is what most people mean by "doing well".

Functioning well. This is psychological well-being in the strict sense, described around six dimensions: accepting yourself, having quality relationships, having autonomy, feeling able to act on your environment, having a purpose, and continuing to develop. You can be satisfied with your life and weak on those dimensions — and the reverse.

The two are correlated without being the same. A demanding job that has meaning can lower the first and raise the second. A very comfortable life without direction often does the opposite.

This text deals with both, because aiming only at the first produces a losing strategy: trying to feel pleasant things permanently is the surest way not to, for reasons explained in section 19.

Where this happens in the programme

Sections 3 to 6 clarify what well-being covers and what makes it vary. Sections 7 to 13 give the six levers. If you were to remember one sentence from this whole text, it would be the one in bold at the top of this section.

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3. The two faces: pleasure and meaning

The distinction above has a practical consequence worth looking at closely, because it explains most dead ends.

Pleasure is immediate and it wears off. A good meal, a successful evening, a long-awaited purchase: the effect is real, agreeable, and it fades quickly. This is a well-described phenomenon, hedonic adaptation: we get used to what changes for the better, and the level of satisfaction returns fairly close to where it started. That is true of a move, a pay rise, a new device.

Meaning is slower and it accumulates. Raising a child, caring for someone, learning a trade, keeping a commitment: these activities often contain less instant pleasure than average, sometimes tiredness and irritation, and they produce a satisfaction that does not wear off in the same way.

An important consequence: pleasure and meaning are not measured in the same place. If you judge your day only on how agreeable it was, the most useful days of your life will score badly.

That does not mean pleasure is secondary. A life without pleasure is not a wise life, it is an impoverished one, and the inability to feel pleasure is a symptom, not a virtue. Both count, and the useful question is not "which is real well-being" but "which one am I missing right now".

Three further components

Three elements come up in almost every description of psychological functioning, and self-determination theory describes them as basic needs whose satisfaction predicts well-being:

Autonomy — the sense of acting for your own reasons, rather than under constraint or obligation.

Competence — the sense of being able, of progressing, of having a grip.

Relatedness — the sense of mattering to someone and of someone mattering to you.

These three will come back throughout part II. When a situation exhausts you for no apparent reason, it is very often because one of the three is at zero.

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4. What well-being is not

Four misunderstandings, and they are expensive.

It is not permanent good mood. People who score highest on well-being do not report an absence of unpleasant emotions: they report fewer, and they recover faster. Sadness, anger and worry are part of a life that is going well; they signal things, and a life that stopped producing them would be a life that no longer engages in anything.

It is not the absence of problems. Well-being does not wait for circumstances to be settled. People in real difficulty — illness, bereavement, precarity — sometimes score high, and the reverse is just as common. Circumstances count, and they count less than you imagine (section 6).

It is not positive thinking. Repeating optimistic affirmations does not reliably improve well-being, and several studies suggest it can harm people with low self-esteem — precisely the people the exercise is recommended to.

It is not a performance. Well-being is not a target to be reached by discipline, with tracking tables and a score to improve. Part of the recent literature shows that valuing happiness excessively is associated with less well-being, particularly because it turns every ordinary moment into a missed opportunity. We come back to this in section 19.

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5. Mental health and mental illness: two axes, not one

Here is the model that structures everything else, and it is more useful than everything before it.

Mental health was long pictured as a line: illness at one end, health at the other. The evidence does not support that image. There are two independent axes: one measures the presence of symptoms, the other the presence of well-being. You can be high or low on each.

Four situations follow, and they describe very different lives.

No disorder and high well-being. What the research calls flourishing: connections, meaning, engagement, a broadly good mood.

No disorder and low well-being. The state described as "languishing": nothing is wrong, nothing is really right. Not enough symptoms for a diagnosis, but a flat life without drive, often with the sense of wasting time. It is a common state, long invisible because it fits no clinical box — and it is precisely the subject of this programme.

A disorder and low well-being. The hardest situation, and the one where treating the disorder comes first.

A disorder and high well-being nonetheless. It exists, it is common, and it explains why two people with the same diagnosis can have incomparable lives.

Three practical consequences.

Treating a disorder does not mechanically produce well-being. Coming out of a depression makes the symptoms go; it does not fill the days, rebuild damaged relationships, or restore direction. That is separate work, and it is often the work neglected at the end of a successful treatment.

Well-being protects. Longitudinal work shows that a high level of well-being predicts a lower risk of later disorder. It is not a luxury granted once you are cured; it is a protective factor.

Languishing deserves attention. It has no diagnosis, it entitles you to nothing, and it spoils years. Recognising it is already useful.

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6. What actually makes well-being vary

Here the evidence begins. Four findings, three of them counter-intuitive.

Part of it is stable and belongs to you. Twin studies estimate that a substantial fraction of the differences in well-being between individuals is heritable, often placed around 30 to 40 %. That does not mean your level is fixed: it means there is a temperament, that some people start higher or lower, and that comparing yourself to others on that ground is of little use.

A word on a much-circulated figure: the split "50 % genes, 40 % voluntary activities, 10 % circumstances" travelled widely, and its own authors have since stressed that it should not be taken literally. The proportions vary by population and by measure. Keep the principle — a stable part, a circumstantial part, a part that depends on what you do — and forget the percentages.

Circumstances count less than expected, with two exceptions. We systematically overestimate the effect of changes in situation on our future happiness: a move, a promotion, a milder climate produce less effect, for less long, than we anticipate. Two notable exceptions resist adaptation: long-term unemployment and chronic pain, whose negative effects do not fade with time.

Money counts, up to a point, and differently for different people. The strongest work shows a real but logarithmic relationship: moving from precarity to material security changes a great deal; doubling an already comfortable income changes little. A recent collaborative study, run by teams that had reached opposing conclusions, refined the picture: for most people well-being keeps rising with income beyond the thresholds long quoted, but it plateaus among the least happy — for whom money does not fix what is wrong.

Relationships are the most consistent factor. This is the most robust result in the whole field, and it appears in very long follow-ups as in meta-analyses: the quality of your connections predicts well-being, health and longevity better than income, social class or even some medical indicators. Social isolation and loneliness are associated with an increase in mortality of an order of magnitude comparable to well-known risk factors.

That is why part II begins there.

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7. The six levers — overview

From here on, you act. Here are the six domains on which the evidence converges, from the most powerful to the most subtle. Each then has its own section.

Lever 1 — Connections. The most consistent factor, and the most neglected because it cannot be settled in one evening. Section 8.

Lever 2 — The body. Sleep, movement, alcohol: the foundation, without which the other five do not hold. Section 9.

Lever 3 — Autonomy and competence. Having a grip, progressing, choosing your reasons. Section 10.

Lever 4 — Meaning and values. What connects your days to what you care about. Section 11.

Lever 5 — Attention. Savouring, comparing less, being there. Section 12.

Lever 6 — Acceptance. Stopping the fight against what is unpleasant. Section 13.

Three rules before you start

One lever at a time. This is the most important rule in this text. Six projects opened at once produce three weeks of enthusiasm and then abandonment. One lever, six weeks, then the next.

Choose the one that is missing, not the one you like. Section 14 offers a way to locate yourself. The useful lever is almost always the one you want to avoid.

One concrete action, with a time. "See more people" is not an action. "Call Marc on Thursday at 6" is. Anything without a time does not happen — that is true here as in every programme on this site.

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8. Lever 1 — Connections

The most powerful lever, and the one that demands the most patience. Three things to know before acting.

Quality counts more than number. What predicts well-being is not the size of the network but the presence of a few relationships in which you can be yourself and on which you can rely. A person with three solid ties is better placed than a person with forty contacts.

Loneliness is not isolation. Isolation is objective — few contacts. Loneliness is subjective — the gap between the relationships you have and the ones you want. You can be surrounded and lonely, and it is that loneliness which is associated with the clearest effects on health.

Weak ties count too. Brief exchanges with people you barely know — a neighbour, a shopkeeper, a colleague from another department — have a measurable effect on the day's mood. It is one of the few simple, quick things in this part.

What works, concretely

Regularity beats intensity. A coffee every three weeks, on a fixed date, beats a long evening twice a year. Relationships are maintained by frequency, not by intensity.

Take the initiative, and accept the imbalance. Most people massively underestimate the pleasure their message will give the other person. The work on this point is fairly consistent: we think we are intruding, and we are giving pleasure. If you are always the one who suggests, that is not necessarily a sign of the other's indifference — it is often a difference of temperament.

Do someone a favour. Helping someone has an effect on the well-being of the helper, measured in several studies, and it is the only lever on this list that produces two beneficiaries.

Reconnect. A relationship damaged by silence almost always reopens with six words — "sorry for the silence, hard time". The imagined cost is far above the real one.

Your action for the week: one specific contact, one person, one day, one time. Write it down now.

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9. Lever 2 — The body

This lever is not the most interesting and it is the foundation: when it is in debt, the other five become inapplicable.

Sleep first. A short night increases reactivity to unpleasant events and reduces the ability to regulate. The most effective measure is a fixed wake-up time, seven days a week. If you have slept badly for months, that is treated in its own right.

Then movement. Meta-analyses show a real, moderate effect of regular physical activity on mood and anxiety, with no adverse effects. The order of magnitude: twenty to thirty minutes, most days, walking included. What counts is regularity, not intensity.

Alcohol. It produces an hour of ease and degrades sleep, the next day's mood and the capacity to act. It is one of the rare points where cutting down produces a quick, visible benefit.

Being outside. The evidence on time spent in natural spaces is more modest but consistent: a positive effect on mood and perceived stress, obtained from fairly short durations. It is simple, free, and it combines with movement and with connections.

What is not established: no diet has demonstrated an effect comparable to these levers, and supplements sold for mood have no solid data. Eating at regular times counts; the rest is commerce.

Your action for the week: one of these five points only, at a fixed time.

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10. Lever 3 — Autonomy and competence

Two needs the research treats together because they support each other.

Autonomy

It is not independence, and that is a frequent confusion. Autonomy, in the sense that predicts well-being, is acting for your own reasons — including when you choose to look after someone, obey a rule or keep a commitment.

Hence a very useful distinction for sorting your days: the same activity can be experienced as chosen or as imposed, and the gap in well-being between the two is considerable. "I'm going to my parents' because I want to" and "because I have no choice" describe the same journey and not the same day.

Two concrete actions. Reframe what is in fact chosen — many obligations are choices you have stopped recognising as such. And remove one real constraint: one only, the most costly, within three months.

Competence

The sense of being able and of progressing. It does not require excellence: it requires observing progress.

That is why learning something difficult is one of the few projects that produce durable well-being: it supplies visible progress, a purpose, and often connections. The condition is calibrated difficulty — enough not to be boring, not enough to be discouraging.

Two traps. Comparison cancels the benefit: progress is measured against yourself three months ago, not against someone else. And perfectionism turns learning into permanent assessment; it is the best way to give up.

Your action for the week: identify one constraint to remove, or one thing to learn, and block out the first slot.

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11. Lever 4 — Meaning and values

The most abstract lever, and one of the best documented: the sense that your life has a direction is associated with better health and, in several cohorts, with lower long-term mortality.

Three clarifications that make it usable.

Meaning is not a calling. It is not about finding the one thing you were made for. Meaning comes from three ordinary sources: contributing to something slightly larger than you, belonging to a group or a story, and understanding — having a coherent reading of your life.

It is made by acting, not by reflecting. Searching for your meaning by thinking about it is a frequent dead end. You find it by doing things that have some: helping, passing on, caring, building, maintaining. The direction appears afterwards.

Values are more operational than goals. A goal is reached or not; a value orients. "Being a present father" is not reached, it is practised — and it can be practised on a Tuesday evening.

The exercise that works best

Write down three values — not thirty. Then, for each, one action of under thirty minutes that you can do this week. That is all. The gap between what people say they value and what their diary contains is usually striking, and it is that gap which produces the sense of a flat life.

Your action for the week: that list, and the first slot booked.

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12. Lever 5 — Attention

Where your attention goes largely determines what your day is worth. Three habits, with evidence of uneven quality.

Savouring. Deliberately prolonging an agreeable moment — noticing it, telling someone, returning to it in the evening — increases what you get from it. The effect is modest and it has the advantage of working on what you already live, without adding anything to your diary.

Comparing less. Upward social comparison — looking at those who have it better — degrades satisfaction fairly reliably. It is the main mechanism by which social media weighs on mood, more than screen time itself. The useful move is not to leave everything, it is to remove the accounts that regularly produce that effect in you. You know which ones.

Being there. Structured mindfulness programmes have shown real effects on stress, anxiety and well-being, generally of moderate size. Two honest caveats: the methodological quality of the studies is uneven, and the effect is often compared with doing nothing rather than with another practice. It remains one of the few attention practices with a consistent file.

A note of caution on gratitude, the most widely shared exercise of all: the evidence is real but clearly more modest than its popularity suggests, and the effects shrink when publication bias is corrected. Section 16 comes back to this.

Your action for the week: one of the three only, seven days in a row.

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13. Lever 6 — Acceptance

The most counter-intuitive lever, and one of the best established.

We spend a great deal of time fighting our internal states: not being anxious, not being sad, not being angry. That fight has a cost, and several studies show that people who habitually accept their unpleasant emotions — without judging them or trying to make them vanish immediately — show fewer anxious and depressive symptoms later on, and better well-being.

Three clarifications, because the word is misunderstood.

Accepting is not approving. It is not about finding good what is not. It is about no longer spending energy on not feeling what is already there.

Accepting is not enduring. Acceptance applies to internal states, not to situations. An unjust situation calls for action; it is the emotion accompanying it that does not need to be fought.

Accepting is active. It is the opposite of resignation: the principle of acceptance and commitment therapies is precisely to act in the direction of what matters with the discomfort, rather than waiting for it to leave.

The practical consequence is simple and demanding: the question is not "how do I feel better before acting" but "what do I do, with what I feel".

Your action for the week: identify one thing you are postponing until you feel ready, and do it without waiting to be.

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14. Locating yourself

Before choosing a lever, work out where you are. It takes ten minutes and prevents you from working on the wrong site.

Overall satisfaction. One question, used in the large international surveys: all things considered, how satisfied are you with your life at the moment, from 0 to 10? Note the figure and the date.

The week's emotions. Over the last seven days, how often did you feel something pleasant — interest, calm, pleasure, pride? And something unpleasant? Two scores from 0 to 10.

The six levers. Score each from 0 to 10, today: connections, body, autonomy and competence, meaning, attention, acceptance.

Then two questions, more useful than the numbers.

Where is your lowest? That is your lever. Not the most agreeable to work on, not the one you are already good at: the lowest.

What moved these scores in the last three months? Look for specific events, not general explanations. Those are your own data, and they are worth more than any average.

Redo the exercise in six weeks. A one-point change in overall satisfaction is already substantial: these scales move slowly.

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15. Choosing a lever, and holding it for six weeks

Here is the full protocol. It fits in five lines, and its difficulty is not in understanding it.

1. One lever only, the one where you are lowest.

2. One action, written down with a day and a time. Not three. Not "more often". One precise action, repeated each week.

3. Six weeks. That is the period below which nothing can be concluded. Well-being scales move slowly, and the enthusiasm of the first ten days proves nothing.

4. One score, once a week. The same day, the same overall satisfaction question from 0 to 10. Ten seconds.

5. After six weeks, you decide. If the score has moved and the action has become natural, keep it and move to the next lever. If nothing has moved, do not start again harder: look at whether the action was too big, too vague, or without a time — it is almost always one of the three.

A remark on pace. Six levers at six weeks is about nine months. That sounds long and that is exactly the point: this text does not propose a change of mindset, it proposes to change what your weeks contain, and that does not go faster.

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16. What works less well than claimed

An important section, and a rare one in this field.

Positive psychology exercises have been the subject of successive meta-analyses. The first concluded that effects were moderate, and they circulated widely. Later re-analyses, correcting for publication bias and the weight of small studies, arrive at markedly smaller effects, sometimes close to zero for certain exercises taken in isolation.

That does not mean nothing works. It means one has to distinguish.

What holds up well. Social connections, physical activity, sleep, emotional acceptance, value-guided action, structured mindfulness programmes. These are changes of life, not five-minute exercises.

What has real but small effects. Gratitude journals, scheduled acts of kindness, the "best possible self" exercise, savouring. They are not useless; they do not change a life on their own, and their popularity is out of all proportion to their effect.

What has not proved itself. Repeated positive affirmations, which there is reason to think can harm people with low self-esteem. Supplements for mood. Unsupported apps, whose actual use collapses within days and whose effects, when measured properly, are weak.

And one thing that makes it worse. Pursuing happiness as an explicit goal is associated, in several studies, with less well-being: it creates a permanent expectation and turns ordinary moments into disappointments. The paradox is well described, and it has a practical consequence — work the levers, yes; monitor your happiness, no.

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17. Money, work, social media

Three questions that always come up, handled briefly and honestly.

Money. It really counts, especially at the bottom of the scale: material security, the absence of urgent debt and the capacity to absorb an unexpected expense have a massive effect. Beyond that, the effect does not disappear but becomes much weaker, and it depends on what you do with it. Two useful findings: buying time — delegating an unpleasant task — produces more well-being than buying an object, and spending on others or on shared experiences returns more than spending on yourself.

Work. What predicts well-being at work is not primarily salary or prestige, but the degree of control over your work, the quality of relationships with colleagues, the clarity of what is expected of you, and the sense that what you do is of use. A demanding job with plenty of autonomy is far better tolerated than a less demanding job with no grip at all. If you have one thing to negotiate, negotiate control.

Social media. The public debate is more clear-cut than the evidence. The average effects of screen time on well-being are small, and what matters is use: passive consumption of content that invites comparison is associated with negative effects; active use, maintaining real relationships, is not. So the reasonable instruction is not "delete everything", it is: remove the accounts that regularly make you feel worse, and replace some passive scrolling with a message to someone.

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18. When well-being is not the right aim

This must be said plainly, because it is the most important limit of this text.

If a disorder is present, it is treated in its own right, and it is treated first. Working on your well-being levers in the middle of a depression is like repainting a room whose ceiling is leaking: the effort is real, it does not hold.

To recognise, and to treat as a priority:

Depression — sadness or loss of interest nearly every day for more than two weeks, disturbed sleep and appetite, fatigue, a sense of worthlessness, concentration difficulties, thoughts of death.

An anxiety disorder — worry or avoidance that organises your life, panic attacks, fear of others' judgement that costs you opportunities.

Problematic use of alcohol or other substances, particularly if you drink to cope or to sleep.

Chronic insomnia established for months, which is very treatable and which improves everything else.

Trauma, recent or old, still producing re-experiencing, hypervigilance or massive avoidance.

And suicidal thoughts, which call for care today, not for reading.

In all those cases well-being is not abandoned: it is simply put in its place, which is afterwards. And one documented piece of good news: working on the levers reduces the risk of relapse once the disorder is treated. That is in fact one of the best arguments for not stopping at the disappearance of symptoms.

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19. The trap of compulsory happiness

A short section, for a very widespread problem.

Well-being has become a social obligation. People are asked to be well, to stay positive, to see the good side; unhappiness is presented as a failure of method, and failing to be happy as a personal failure.

That produces three measurable effects, all in the wrong direction.

Permanent disappointment. The more you value happiness as a goal, the more ordinary moments become missed opportunities. Several studies find this association, including in situations meant to be enjoyable.

Shame. When an inner state becomes a performance, failing at it becomes a fault. A secondary suffering is then added — feeling bad about feeling bad — which is often heavier than the first.

Isolation. The obligation to be well makes it impossible to say you are not, and therefore removes access to the most powerful lever: other people.

The reasonable position fits in one sentence: you can work on what makes a life better without turning happiness into a requirement. The levers in part II are ways of living, not targets to hit. On the day your score does not move, nothing serious has happened.

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20. Common questions

"Can well-being be decided?" Only partly, and not directly. You do not decide to feel good; you decide what your weeks contain. The rest follows, slowly and imperfectly.

"I have no problems and I am bored with my life." That is the exact description of languishing (section 5). It is neither an illness nor a whim, it is a well-being deficit, and levers 1, 3 and 4 respond to it best.

"How long before I feel something?" A few days for the body and attention levers, several weeks for connections, several months for meaning. Global satisfaction scales move slowly: do not look at them more than once a week.

"Does well-being make you healthier?" The associations are solid — lower mortality, better cardiovascular health, lower risk of later disorders. The causal direction is harder to establish: part of it probably comes from good health making people happier, and not only the reverse. So caution about promises; the association itself is real.

"And if my circumstances are genuinely bad?" Then part of this text does not apply, and that should be said. Long-term unemployment, chronic pain, precarity, an abusive relationship are not offset by gratitude. What remains applicable: connections, the body, and value-guided action, which keep their effect in difficult circumstances.

"Do you have to be extraverted to do well?" No. Extraversion is associated on average with higher scores, but it is quality connections that count, not their number or the noise they make. Two deep relationships are plenty.

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21. What you can expect

Let us be precise, because false expectations make people abandon what was working.

What you can expect in six weeks, on one lever: days that contain something, a few more contacts, the sense of choosing rather than submitting, and a satisfaction score that moves by one point — which is a lot on these scales.

What you should not expect: a transformation. Your temperament will not change, bad days will still exist, and there will still be flat weeks. What changes is not the general colour of your mood, it is what your weeks contain — and in the long run, that comes to the same thing.

And keep this in mind: one lever held for nine months is worth infinitely more than six levers held for three weeks.

One last thing. Well-being is not a state you reach and then keep. It is the result, day after day, of what you give your time and attention to. That is disappointing if you were hoping for a click; it is encouraging if you notice that it puts the thing within reach, on more or less any Tuesday.

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22. Sources and foundations

This resource is an original text written for Psychotip. It draws on published work, without reproducing the material of any proprietary programme.

• Subjective well-being (work of E. Diener and colleagues): life satisfaction, positive and negative affect, and their measurement.
• Six-dimension psychological well-being (C. Ryff): self-acceptance, positive relations, autonomy, environmental mastery, purpose in life, personal growth.
• The two-continua model and the notion of languishing (C. L. M. Keyes): mental health and mental illness as distinct axes, and the predictive value of well-being for later disorder.
• Self-determination theory (E. Deci and R. Ryan): autonomy, competence and relatedness as basic psychological needs.
• Hedonic adaptation and affective forecasting (Brickman and colleagues; Gilbert and Wilson): the fading effect of changed circumstances, and our systematic overestimation of their future impact.
• Heritability of well-being: twin studies estimating a substantial genetic share of individual differences; and their own authors' warnings about the often-quoted percentage split.
• Income and well-being: work by Kahneman and Deaton (2010), by Killingsworth (2021), and the subsequent adversarial collaboration (Killingsworth, Kahneman and Mellers) clarifying that well-being keeps rising with income for most people but plateaus among the least happy.
• Social relationships, loneliness and health: very long-running longitudinal studies, and meta-analyses associating social isolation and loneliness with increased mortality (work of Holt-Lunstad and colleagues).
• Unemployment and chronic pain: work showing the absence of full hedonic adaptation to these two situations.
• Physical activity, sleep and exposure to nature: meta-analyses reporting real, moderate effects on mood, anxiety and perceived stress.
• Meaning and purpose in life: work associating a higher sense of purpose with better health and lower mortality (notably Hill and Turiano, 2014).
• Acceptance of unpleasant emotions (Ford and colleagues, 2018) and acceptance and commitment therapies: value-guided action rather than waiting for a favourable internal state.
• Positive psychology interventions: initial meta-analyses (Sin and Lyubomirsky, 2009; Bolier and colleagues, 2013) and later re-analyses correcting publication bias and finding markedly smaller effects.
• Pursuing happiness as a goal: work associating excessive valuing of happiness with lower well-being.
• Positive affirmations: work showing null or negative effects in people with low self-esteem.
• Social comparison and social media use: work distinguishing passive from active use, and recalling the small size of average screen-time effects.
• Control at work: the demand–control model and the associated literature on autonomy as a predictor of occupational well-being.

Content last reviewed: 2026.