Although wellbeing always includes striving for health, it’s more about living life fully. It’s about designing a personal lifestyle suited to who you are, and living in such a way to be the best version of what your potentials, circumstances, and fate allow.

As a human being, you have an inherent ethical obligation to take your wellbeing seriously to promote feelings of worthiness. Because sufficient self-care results in being a well-rounded person, someone who is able to look after themself and through that, able to serve others and contribute to society.

People who take their wellbeing seriously, feel healthy and full of energy to take on daily activities. They are satisfied, interested, and engaged – experiencing a sense of accomplishment from their activities and consider their lives to be meaningful.

Individuals with high levels of wellbeing are more productive at work, earn more money, and are more capable to contribute to their family and communities. In health, they are associated with little risk of disease, illness, and injury, better immune functioning, speedier recovery, and increased longevity.

Addressing all Components of Wellbeing

There is no consensus around a single definition of what wellbeing encompasses – but there’s a general agreement that, at its minimum, wellbeing includes the presence of positive emotions and moods (feeling good, contentment, happiness), the absence of negative emotions (depression, anxiety), resulting in complete satisfaction with life, feelings of fulfillment and positive functioning, with something meaningful to strive for.

Each dimension of wellbeing contributes to your overall wellbeing status. They are interlaced and can have an influence on one another. Neglecting any one of them for any length of time, can have an adverse effect on your overall wellbeing, so it’s important to maintain harmony in all.

They do not, however, have to be equally balanced. You should aim, instead, to strive for a personal harmony that feels most authentic to you, informed by your priorities, approaches, aspirations, and views of what it means to live life fully.

Traditional Wellbeing Perspectives

Wellbeing is a complex construct that concerns optimal experience and functioning. Previous research on wellbeing has been derived from two general perspectives: 

Hedonic approach, which focuses on happiness and defines wellbeing in terms of pleasure attainment and pain avoidance.

Eudaimonic approach, which focuses on meaning and self-realisation and defines wellbeing in terms of the degree to which a person is fully functioning. 

These two views have given rise to different research foci and a body of knowledge that is in some areas divergent and in others complementary.