Weird Things About Well-Being
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You know the terms from countless Harvard Business Review articles, TED talks, books, and social media posts. Happiness. Meaning and purpose in life. Well-being. Resilience. Quality of life. Flourishing. Positivity. Thriving.
Can you define these terms? Could you confidently explain the differences between them?
I'll be honest, I can't. And I'm not alone. There is a tangled mess of overlapping terms. So many motherfucking terms with so little clarity on how to distinguish them.
Instead of (only) complaining, my colleagues and I gave it a whirl to try and untangle them.
You can check out our published article here: CLICK HERE FOR FREE PDF
Here’s a sneak preview of the Figure tied to our main results:
This colorful network map is a snapshot of data we've collected so far. What you're observing are themes from 155 measures of positive mental health extracted from 200 scientific articles. The distance of the dimensions from the 3 colored nodes (Well-Being, Resilience, Quality of Life) indicates their prevalence in the literature. For example, Meaning and Purpose are relevant to each dimension whereas Physical Health is mostly limited to science on Quality of Life - fitting with my criticism of how often psychology only focuses on the neck up.
To me, this offers insight into the jingle-jangle of terms that plague not just science but public communication about science.
What I mentioned above is an interesting exploratory study of what the field looks like. But let me offer insights on what else we found (yet to be published) and what we are doing next to improve the field…