Wellbeing:
Finding the Good Life
September 2022 | The Learning and Wellbeing Team
What is the good life? What makes you happy? For well over two thousand years, writers from a variety of disciplines, including philosophy, literature, religious and spiritual studies, as well as neuroscience and psychology, have attempted to answer this most basic and fundamental question that concerns each and every one of us. But it is only in the past few decades that research psychologists have started to measure what happiness is, figure out what predicts it, and determine whether your degree of happiness can be increased.
Contemporary psychologists, such as Martin Seligman, believe that there are five domains that contribute to your overall wellbeing and happiness. These include Positive moods, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning and Achievement or PERMA for short. Large scales studies have shown that high levels of well-being are related to high levels of performance and success in many different areas of your life, both school and work.
In this way, PERMA serves as a road map for well-being and success, both now while you are in school but also throughout the rest of your life. Large scales studies have shown that high levels of well-being are related to high levels of performance and success in many different areas of your life, both school and work.
But PERMA says that you will do better if you can find well-being in each of the five different domains. The idea is that if you just focus on achievement (e.g., your studies, your job or your career), you might be missing other areas of well-being that can boost your total amount of well-being, especially if and when you hit a rough patch at school and work.
PERMA is about a balanced lifestyle that includes activities that give you joy (e.g., exercise, gaming if you like), activities that provide you with a feeling of accomplishment (e.g., even just getting stuff done), and activities with friends (e.g., going out, watching movies), but also activities that can, at times, captivate you and activities that give you a real sense of purpose – both of which can take time to find.
Next steps: The first step is to take the well-being survey and figure out where your self-worth is coming from and where you might find a little bit more. The next step is to identify one or two activities that are related to those domains that you are not utilizing as much as you could. So, take the quiz and download the worksheet. Good luck, and let us know how it went.
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