Our Solution to Managing an Absurd 196 Dimensions of Well-Being
Get a copy of our new article on Positive Mental Health
In case you missed it…
Provoked is for playful, intelligent, discerning readers. If you like what I’m doing and want to support this work, join for free or upgrade with benefits.
🚨 Does it annoy you that well-being researchers and practitioners seem to have 8,647 ways that they define well-being ? 🚨
This served as the curiosity lure opening an article on LinkedIn that received a lot of attention. I’m here to tell you that the number is inaccurate. A systematic review found evidence of 99 different self-report instruments in use and inside them are 196 distinct dimensions (link); notably, our own team with Researching Happy with Dr Matthew Iasiello found even more (155 measures and 410 dimensions!).
To acknowledge how silly this is, let’s play a number game.
196 factorial is the number of ways you can arrange 196 items in a sequence. The number has 366 digits. For scale, there are roughly 10^80 atoms in the observable universe. 196 factorial is so much larger! I’m not going to type it out because it would fill the rest of this issue.
Now how many different well-being scales could you build by picking asubset of these 196 dimensions? The answer is 2^196. Every researcher who invents a new scale is pulling one combination out of a hat containing 100 billion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion possibilities. This is the state of the field.
A team in Rotterdam measures well-being with 21 dimensions. A team in São Paulo uses 7. Your employer’s HR team uses 4, and one of them is about whether you think your manager is a doofus. Each team publishes and in hopes of winning promotions and salary increases pretends the other scales and approaches do not exist.
This is why people slander psychology. You won’t find the field of cardiology with 196 definitions of blood pressure.
This week, led by Researching Happy with Dr Matthew Iasiello and an impressive team, we published a study in Nature Mental Health (read to the end for a free PDF). We asked 122 experts across 11 disciplines to vote on the dimensions of positive mental health that belong in a shared taxonomy. The voting ran three rounds. The result was a list of 19 dimensions that cleared 75% agreement, and within that list, six dimensions exceeded 90% agreement.
Six crossed the 90% consensus threshold:
Meaning and purpose. You possess a clear mission in life and are actively constructing moments of meaning and/or pursuing this mission regularly. For a tighter definition and framework - CLICK HERE
Life satisfaction. This is a cognitive evaluation of your life, looking at the whole thing with an answer that on balance (not eery day) lands closer to thumbs up than down.
Self-acceptance. You can look at yourself, including the parts you find suboptimal, and appreciate who you are and what you are becoming.
Connection. Close, caring relationships with other humans. When you interact with someone, you feel visible and there is a mutual willingness to share worlds in some capacity.
Autonomy. You feel in charge of your own choices and the ways that you engage in self-expression.
Happiness. Frequent positive mood and cheerfulness. This is the pleasant emotional element that dovetails nicely with the cognitive element of life satisfaction.
Thirteen more cleared the 75% hurdle.
These are the dimensions that fill in the spaces of what we mean by pursuing and sometimes achieving a good life. Note that these definitions are mine, taken from an impressive array of researchers. If you want the original studies that influenced me, ask in the comments.
Acceptance. A nonjudgmental, non-avoidant stance toward present internal experience, including unwanted thoughts, sensations, and emotions, such that their presence does not dictate behavior.
Competence. The perception that one can effectively produce desired outcomes through one’s own actions within valued domains.
Engagement. Absorbed attention to an activity such that awareness of time, self-consciousness, and distraction drop away, producing sustained involvement with the task at hand. Descended from Csikszentmihalyi’s flow construct - for more on this, CLICK HERE.
Development. The subjective experience of ongoing growth in one’s capabilities, self-understanding, or character across time, coupled with openness to continued change.
Optimism. Generalized expectancy that future outcomes will be favorable.
Self-congruence. Alignment between one’s behavior, expressed identity, and internally held values across most situations.
Fun. The experience of light, pleasurable, playful activity undertaken for its own sake.
Vitality. The subjective sense of physical and psychological energy available to the self.
Activities and functioning. Active participation in the meaningful roles and tasks that compose one’s life, including self-care, work, relationships, and leisure, at a level consistent with one’s own standards.
Achievement. The accomplishment of self-selected goals requiring effort, skill, or persistence, accompanied by the recognition that the goal mattered.
Calmness. A state of low physiological and cognitive arousal characterized by relaxed alertness and the absence of anxiety, agitation, or rumination. Distinct from happiness in that it occupies the low-arousal positive quadrant of the affect circumplex.
Belonging. The subjective sense of being a valued, accepted member of a relational group or community. Distinct from connection, which concerns dyadic relationships.
Social contribution. The belief that one’s actions provide value to other people or to society beyond immediate self-interest. Fits nicely with the concept of generativity.
Nineteen dimensions that offers a 90% reduction from the 196 dimension chaos the BMJ Open review documented.
Nine candidates whose failing might upset some people
Our panel considered dimensions that the wellness industry treats as the end game. Here is what did not make the cut as a dimension of positive mental health:
Physical health
Personal circumstances, meaning income, housing, neighborhood
Problem-focused coping
Emotion-focused coping
Spirituality
Novelty
Accepting of others
A positive view of people and society
Avoidance coping, which was the only dimension voted out for explicit exclusion
The experts did not say these things are unimportant. They said they are antecedents or drivers or inputs. Conditions that help produce well-being but are not the thing itself. Something I wrote about as a graduate student in 2004 to criticize the field (that angered a lot of eminent researchers because who was I as a 20-something to judge their work!). See for yourself at the slop fest inside one of the most widely used measures of happiness from my article:
Get the PDF here:
Your income is not your mental health. Your gym habit is not your mental health. Your meditation practice is not your mental health. Your housing stability is not your mental health. All of those feed in but confusing the river with the rain is how a field ends up with 196 dimensions and chaotic attempts by journalists and authors trying to make sense of it all.
A big caveat of our work
The Delphi panel was 83.6% White and drawn mostly from wealthy Western countries. The taxonomy is a first draft. Ikigai did not make the list and maybe should have. Indigenous frameworks might offer dimensions and details to sharpen it. We the authors know this and say so.
Where this leaves you
Rank the nineteen dimensions for yourself from strongest to weakest.
The full Nature Mental Health paper is below. It is worth the read. Tell us your thoughts in the comments and post it elsewhere so we can find out how other people feel about this.
The field evolves with productive disagreement where everyone assumes positive intentions and writes from a place of kindness and non-defensiveness. It will never be perfect because human beings are complex, heterogeneous creatures. And still we persevere in the pursuit…
Share this with interested people.
Comment - I will respond here and in the chat room and virtual calls.
Todd B. Kashdan is the author of several books including The Upside of Your Dark Side (Penguin) and The Art of Insubordination: How to Dissent and Defy Effectively (Avery/Penguin) and Professor of Psychology and Founder of The Well-Being Laboratory at George Mason University.
Wow Todd, I love your categorization. It certainly helps to refocus attention more effectively. Have you cross referenced your list with the VIA 24 character strengths? At first blush I’m thinking there is a lot of congruency. ☺️
Another thought I have had after reading some of your posts, has to do with what was intended with “positive interventions”. While I do believe that many of the interventions could be helpful to those individuals with significant mental health issues, psychology has already identified many facilitated interventions (psychotherapy, medications, CBT, motivational interviewing,
ACT, etc) that were better directed for effective treatment.
My understanding of positive psychology is that it was directed towards individuals who believed that while their lives were OK, perhaps there were ways to make it so much better. This has the potential to increase hope & self-efficacy. At the risk of sounding like I’ve drank too much of the Koolaid, this differentiation makes sense to me. And, I have also benefited from CBT & psychotherapy at times when that was more helpful to me. Interested in your further thoughts!
Excellent article, Todd! Thanks so much for allowing us, including myself to enjoy this article for free on Substack and on Facebook. Much appreciated and much respect! FYI, how was your birthday yesterday? Please let me know! Email me at romanticsinger24@gmail.com or feel free to call me on my free TextNow phone number, 1-571-500-8485. Hope to hear back from you sometime soon, Todd!