Essential Elements of Well Being

In a previous blog entry I explained Martin Seligman's five areas of well being: positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaningfulness, and accomplishment.  They can be easily remembered by the acronym PERMA. 

Complementing his ideas are Tom Rath and Jim Hartner's five essential elements of well being from their book of the same name.  The five essential elements are:

Career

Social

Financial

Physical

Community

Career

We spend the majority of our lives at work so work should be something that rewards us, stimulates us, and satisfies us.  That's not always easy to obtain from work, but if we consider that one of Seligman's qualities of well being is meaningfulness than applying meaningfulness to the largest part of our lives is essential to our well being.  We just need to ask ourselves am I enjoying my work?  If not, what can we do to enjoy it more?  Can we accept and appreciate it for what it is and what it gives us outside of the work day?  Or is it perhaps time that we pursue something else that meets more of our needs? 

Social

This is similar to Seligman's relationships.  Caring about others and being cared about by others, and loving others and being loved by others make us emotionally and psychologically well.  It's also important to surround yourself with people who you feel are people who manifest well being in the form of PERMA or the essential elements.  There's a lot of research in the field of positive psychology that proves our friends and even the friends of our friends influence us more than our own selves. 

Financial

We assume that career means financial success.  We assume that financial success means wealth.  Neither is true.  There's a cliché in our culture: do what you love and the money will follow, which is encouraged by the law of attraction and the spirituality of abundance.  Rath and Hartner state, however, that “security is more important than income.”  We all know of people who make twice as much as we do and yet are in more debt or have less in savings or want more money than they have.  Money can be such a complicated issue, and yet, including it as an essential element of well being highlights our need to understand it.  We need financial security to meet our basic needs and when we don't have this financial security it is difficult to obtain well being.  The tricky part is understanding what constitutes security.  Is it thirty thousand?  Is it sixty thousand? Is it a hundred and twenty thousand?  Are these numbers for one person, a couple, or parents with a child or children?  In our country, those numbers might seem reasonable to many people.  In a third world country, they would seem like the epitome of wealth.  It's all relative, of course.  It's important, nonetheless, to constantly question our relationship to money.  What do we need? What do we want?  How does what we've always “needed” or “wanted” influence us on our assumptions about what we need and want?

Physical

Our physical health might be the most important factor toward our well being. When we are sick or in pain it affects our emotional and mental well being.  Similarly, when we are healthy, our health affects our emotional and mental well being.  The opposite holds true also: when we are in emotionally and mentally healthy we tend to have better physical health.  It's the mind-body connection.  It's why eating well and exercising is important. 

Community

Similarly to Seligman's relationships and meaningfulness.  Getting together with other people is important.  A lot of research shows that people who participate in a religious, recreational, creative, or sports related groups have more well being.  It's not necessarily the nature of the group that's important—find something that suits you—it's the commitment and connection you make with other people.