Wellbeing is the experience of health, happiness, and prosperity. It includes having good mental health, high life satisfaction, a sense of meaning or purpose, and the ability to manage stress. More generally, wellbeing is just feeling well.
Wellbeing is something sought by just about everyone because it includes so many positive things — feeling happy, healthy, socially connected, and purposeful. Unfortunately, wellbeing appears to be in decline. And increasing your wellbeing can be tough without knowing what to do and how to do it.
Can You Improve Your Wellbeing?
Increasing your wellbeing is simple; there are tons of skills you can build. But increasing your wellbeing is not always easy: Figuring out what parts of wellbeing are most important for you and figuring out how, exactly, to build wellbeing skills usually require some extra help.
How Long Does It Take to Improve Wellbeing?
Usually, when people start consistently using science-based techniques for enhancing wellbeing or emotional wellness, they begin to feel better pretty quickly. In the studies, most people show significant improvements within five weeks. But you have to stick to it. If you are feeling better after five weeks, you can't just stop there.
Why? Well, you probably already know that if you stop eating healthy and go back to eating junk food, then you'll end up back where you started. It turns out that the exact same thing is true for different types of wellbeing. If you want to maintain the benefits you gain, you'll have to continue to engage in wellbeing boosting practices to maintain your skills. So, it's really helpful to have strategies and tools that help you stick to your long-term goals — for example, a happiness and wellbeing plan or wellbeing boosting activity that you can continue to use throughout your life.
Where Does Wellbeing Come From?
Wellbeing emerges from your thoughts, actions, and experiences — most of which you have control over. For example, when we think positively, we tend to have greater emotional wellbeing. When we pursue meaningful relationships, we tend to have better social wellbeing. And when we lose our job — or just hate it — we tend to have lower workplace wellbeing. These examples start to reveal how broad wellbeing is, and how many different types of wellbeing there are.
Because wellbeing is such a broad experience, let's break it down into its different types.
5 Types of Wellbeing:
Emotional Wellbeing. The ability to practice stress management and relaxation techniques, be resilient, boost self-love, and generate the emotions that lead to good feelings.
Physical Wellbeing. The ability to improve the functioning of your body through healthy living and good exercise habits.
Social Wellbeing. The ability to communicate, develop meaningful relationships with others, and maintain a support network that helps you overcome loneliness.
Workplace Wellbeing. The ability to pursue your interests, values, and life purpose in order to gain meaning, happiness, and enrichment professionally.
Societal Wellbeing. The ability to actively participate in a thriving community, culture, and environment.
To build your overall wellbeing, you have to make sure all of these types are functioning to an extent.
Think of it like this: Imagine you are in a car. Your engine works great, and maybe your transmission works pretty well, too, but your brakes don't work. Because your brakes don't work, it doesn't really matter how well your engine works; you're still going to have trouble going about your life.
The same is true for your wellbeing. If everything else in your life is going great, but you feel lonely, or you're eating unhealthfully, other areas of your life will be affected, and you likely won't feel as well as you want to.
Because each part of wellbeing is important to your overall sense of wellbeing, let's talk about how to build each type of wellbeing:
Emotional Wellbeing.
To develop emotional wellbeing, we need to build emotional skills — skills like positivity, emotion regulation, and mindfulness, for example. Often, we need to build a variety of these skills to cope with the wide variety of situations we encounter in our lives. When we have built these emotional wellbeing skills, we can better cope with stress, handle our emotions in the face of challenges, and quickly recover from disappointments. As a result, we can enjoy our lives a bit more, be happier and pursue our goals a bit more effectively.
Here are some of the skills that research suggests contribute to emotional wellbeing:
Happiness Skills:
Mindfulness Skills
Positive Thinking Skills
Resilience Skills
Physical Wellbeing.
To develop our physical wellbeing, we need to know what a healthy diet and exercise routine look like so that we can implement effective strategies in our daily lives. When we improve our physical wellbeing, not only do we feel better, but our newfound health can also help prevent many diseases, heal our guts, boost our emotional wellbeing, and limit the number of health challenges we have to deal with in our lives.
Here are some of the things that can help you boost your physical wellbeing:
Eating for Health
Detoxing Your Body
Correcting Nutritional Deficiencies
Unfortunately, it's possible to eat healthily but still be unhealthy. We can accidentally miss important foods or nutrients. Or we can overburden ourselves with toxins from plastic or processed food. As a result, we may need to eat additional foods, detox our bodies, or prevent these toxins from entering our bodies again. This is why it's essential to learn about health so that we can make the right changes — those that lead to long-term health and wellbeing.
Social Wellbeing.
To develop social wellbeing, we need to build our social skills, like gratitude, kindness, and communication. Social skills make it easier for us to have positive interactions with others, helping us to feel less lonely, angry, or disconnected. When we have developed our social wellbeing, we feel more meaningfully connected to others.
Here are some of the skills that research suggests contribute to better social wellbeing:
Practising Gratitude (for example with a gratitude journal)
Building Meaningful Social Connections
Managing Your Relationship with Technology
It's important to know that building social wellbeing is one of the best ways to build emotional wellbeing. When we feel socially connected, we also tend to just feel better, have more positive emotions, and are able to cope better with challenges. This is why it's essential to build our social wellbeing.
Workplace Wellbeing.
To develop our workplace wellbeing, we need to build skills that help us pursue what really matters to us. This can include building professional skills which help us to meet our life goals and help us manifest things, but it also includes things like living our values and maintaining work-life balance. These skills let us enjoy our work more, helping us to stay focused, motivated, and successful at work. When we have developed workplace wellbeing, our work, and therefore each day, feels more meaningful.
Here are some of the key skills you need for workplace wellbeing:
Maintaining Work-Life Balance
Finding Your Purpose
Because we spend so much time at work, building our workplace wellbeing has a big impact on our overall well-being.
Societal Wellbeing.
To develop societal wellbeing, we need to build skills that make us feel interconnected with all things. We need to know how to support our environment, build stronger local communities, and foster a culture of compassion, fairness, and kindness. These skills help us feel like we're part of a thriving community that really supports one another and the world at large. When we cultivate societal wellbeing, we feel like we are a part of something bigger than just ourselves and live happily.
Although each of us only makes up a tiny fraction of society, it takes all of us to create societal wellbeing. If each of us did one kind act for someone else in our community, then we would live in a very kind community. Or if all of us decide we are going to recycle, then suddenly we create a world with significantly less waste. In order to live in a healthy society, we too need to contribute to making a healthy society.
Here are some of the skills you can build for greater societal wellbeing:
Living Your Values
Creating a Plastic-Free Home
Making Positive Impacts on Other People’s Lives
Kindness
Who Benefits Most From Building Wellbeing?
Not everyone experiences the same benefits from building their wellbeing. For example, lots of research suggests that the more motivated you are to build wellbeing skills, the greater the impact. Perhaps this is not surprising.
Still, other research shows that having skills like a growth mindset or a positive attitude can actually help you build your other wellbeing skills more easily. This is why we tend to encourage people to build these skills first — afterwards, you may be able to increase the other types of wellbeing more easily.
In addition, building wellbeing skills is perhaps most beneficial for people struggling the most, particularly if they've recently undergone something stressful. It may be harder to build wellbeing during this time, but the impact may be greater because there is more room for improvement.
There Is No Magic About Building Wellbeing.
Keep in mind that it takes time and effort to build any new skill set — that includes wellbeing skills. It's important to be realistic with yourself about what you can reasonably accomplish in a given amount of time. Having unrealistic expectations can lead you to give up before you've reached your wellbeing goals. So it's key to create a realistic plan for your wellbeing, stick to it, and take small actions every day that add up to big improvements over time. The truth is, we all struggle, and new struggles can and will pop up, even if you're doing well. But the longer we've worked on strengthening our wellbeing skills, the easier it is to be resilient, take the actions needed to bounce back, and continue moving forward.
Growing your wellbeing is a lifelong pursuit, but it is totally worth it.