The Psychology of Wellbeing

Gary Wood, Gary W. Wood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367898090
• eBook ISBN: 9781000207941
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Applied Psychology
• Index: Psychology

How can we improve our sense of wellbeing? What explains the current wellbeing boom? What does wellbeing mean to you?

The Psychology of Wellbeing offers readers tools to navigate their own wellbeing and understand what makes a 'good life'. Using self-reflection and storytelling, it explores how trust affects psychological and emotional wellbeing, considers how stress and inequality impact our psychological wellbeing, and how trends such as positive psychology influence our understanding of happiness.

In a world where the 'wellness economy' is big business, The Psychology of Wellbeing shows how we can question and make sense of information sources, and sheds light on the wellness, self-care and self-help industry.

1

INTRODUCTION

Defining wellbeing, psychology, and the self

THE WELLBEING BOOM

Questions of how to ‘live the good life’ and to ‘live long and prosper’¹ have occupied us for thousands of years. But it is modern academic research in psychology that has led the current ‘wellbeing boom’. More of us now spend more time talking about it, reading about it, researching it, and writing about it. From magazines to self-help books, from workplace reports to government papers, its pull is far-reaching. And, even if we cannot agree on how to spell it, we can, at least, concur that wellbeing² is big business. In 2017, globally, the ‘wellness economy’ was estimated at $42 trillion, and it shows no signs of slowing.³ That’s a lot of wellbeing! Or is it? With so much on offer, it grows ever tougher to sift the science from the ‘snake oil’. We are spoilt for choice.

With a glut of wellbeing information, how do we decide what works, what doesn’t, and what’s just hype? And how do we know what makes a ‘good life’? Is it financial security or good relationships? Is it having a purpose in life and setting goals? Is it being mindful or grateful? Is it all down to positive thinking, or simply good luck?⁴ Or, is it ‘a little bit of everything’? And in our quest to find the answers, in what or whom do we put our trust? Do we rely on scientists, academics, and doctors? Or do we listen to the politicians who tell us that ‘people have had enough of experts’?⁵ What then? Do we count on journalists, self-help authors, media pundits, self-styled gurus, and bloggers to filter information for us? Or maybe we take our lead from ‘Karen’ on Facebook,⁶ or the ‘friend of a friend’ who ‘knows someone’. And let us not forget our everyday appeals to the authority of the mysterious ‘they’ who always have lots to say about everything.⁷ How do we spot the breakthroughs from the fake news? How do we get the upper hand and make sense of it all?

THE PLAN

The Psychology of Wellbeing is a short, accessible exploration to bridge the gaps between ‘everyday’ ideas, pop psychology,⁸ and academic knowledge. It is chiefly about psychological wellbeing. But it also deals with aspects of physical health that affect cognition, emotions, and moods. It is not possible, in this slim volume, to review all on offer in the ‘shopping cart’ of wellness. Instead, the book focuses on critical skills and offers a framework to assess questions around wellbeing.⁹ To meet these goals, it uses self-reflection and storytelling as learning devices. This strategy helps to shed light on the common ground between self-help books and current approaches to research methods. We just need the tools – something to help structure our reflections and analyze our storytelling.

It is standard, in academic psychology, to clarify the key terms of the debate. These are short, working definitions¹⁰ to align readers, writers, and researchers. But we begin with a personal definition of wellbeing – what it means to you, because reflection is a vital part of the learning process.¹¹ Your version provides the basis to examine academic meanings. Then, each chapter in the book offers a chance to refine your definitions, both personal and formal. In this way, it also gives a gentle nod to the self-help genre.¹²

Our tour begins with familiar, social enquiries about our wellbeing and how we respond.

EVERYDAY WELLBEING

How are you? How are you doing? Are you well?

We ask and answer questions about each other’s wellness countless times during our lives. But what goes through your mind during these everyday happenings? Some years ago, I had a comical stay at a bed-and-breakfast guesthouse. On greeting the owner with ‘Good morning. How are you today?’ he snapped back, ‘Do you really care?’¹³ I was taken aback, but it’s a valid point. In routine exchanges about wellness, how do you tell real interest from polite social ritual? Consider how your questions and replies vary across settings and times and with different people. How do you know when to give the full story, the edited highlights, or something vague but civil? In reacting to this simple question, there is a complex process at play. These interactions show how we tap into pre-existing scripts that we edit ‘on the fly’ to tell our life stories, as we go.

Now, if a psychologist asked about your wellbeing, how might you answer? Or, if you had to draft an essay or a report on wellbeing, where would you start? And how would your personal definition differ from a general one?

Pause for a moment to reflect, and then read on.

DEFINING THE TERMS OF THE DEBATE

In academic examinations, first we take a moment to read the questions and spot the keywords. Consider the question ‘How can psychology help us to understand wellbeing?’ The keywords psychology and wellbeing infer other concepts. Wellbeing implies a sense of the ‘being’ that is being well – the Self. It is a concept central to both evidence-based academic psychology and the self-help genre in pop psychology. And to explain what psychology is, we need to consider what it does, how it’s done, and who does it. The earlier question suggests that psychology will be helpful and aid understanding. But helpful to whom? And, whose understanding will it aid? These questions are the basis of our critical analysis. So, let’s take a step back and start with a working definition of the self.

What is the self?

Taken-for-granted concepts can be the most difficult to ‘pin down’. Surely, the self is self-explanatory. The self is who you are. But saying ‘it is what it is’ doesn’t tell us much. The psychology of the self could fill several volumes, and we only have limited space here. So, before we get to know it, respect it, be true to it, be well in it, help it, or reinvent it, we need to have, at least, an idea of what ‘it’ is.¹⁴ Let’s open with the self as ‘your sense of you as a separate, distinctive, experiencing being’.¹⁵ This concept includes the impression that the self is constant and predictable. It also includes a personal evaluation, known as your self-esteem.¹⁶ It helps to think of your self-concept as your centre of gravity.¹⁷ In psychology, it plays a vital part in motivation, cognition, affect, and social identity.¹⁸ Your sense of self extends to all aspects of your life, from the clothes you wear to the choices you make. So, consider as a starting point what distinguishes and separates you from other experiencing beings. All these factors affect your idea of wellbeing. That is, whether you want to attain and maintain it, or read or write about it.

What is wellbeing?

Wellbeing is another concept that seems obvious but can be hard to define.¹⁹ In turn, this makes it harder to measure it – to quantify or qualify it. Vagueness might not matter in everyday chats, but clarity is crucial for academic research and how we apply it. At its most basic, wellbeing is just feeling well – ‘the experience of health, happiness and prosperity’. And this includes good mental health, life satisfaction, a sense of meaning in life, and how well we cope with stress.²⁰ It is useful to think of wellbeing as a state of balance (equilibrium). It is how well our personal resources meet our life challenges, in the physical, social, and psychological domains.²¹

From a research perspective, this helps to ensure that the research is relevant to the people taking part in the study. It is vital to keep in mind who will read the research and whom it seeks to benefit. This thought leads us to the aims and means of psychology.

What is psychology? What is research?

Academic psychology is evidence-based. It aims to explore, in a systematic way, what makes us tick and what it means to be human. It claims to be ‘the scientific study of mind and behaviour’.²² To realize this goal, we use methods from the natural sciences such as experiments, observations, and surveys. These methods give us data in the form of numbers (quantitative), or words and pictures (qualitative), or a mixture of both.²³ Conclusions are led by the data. We should not jump to them, or ‘go beyond’ the data. But it is also about more than just the data. It is about the spirit of science and the quest for ever-closer approximations to the truth.

Psychology aims to develop and test theories to uncover universal principles that explain and predict human behaviour and experience. Sometimes it confirms ‘common sense’ and, at others, it offers a radically different view. This gap can be jarring, especially when experts disagree with one another. But as playwright and poet Oscar Wilde said, ‘The truth is rarely pure and never simple’.²⁴ Often, we cannot condense complex research findings to pithy newspaper headlines – without losing something vital. There are always caveats and footnotes. In the real world, when we crave certainty, this ‘small print’ can be annoying.²⁵ However, a more methodical approach can help to assess the various aspects of being human (and being well). We can seek to ‘isolate’²⁶ the personal from the psychological and the cultural.²⁷ And each aspect will have a distinct back story, as we explore in the next chapter. Meanwhile, briefly, we look at the difference between academic psychology and pop psychology.

Bridging the knowledge gap

The Psychology of Wellbeing draws on a wealth of ideas, theories and evidence from a broad review of disciplines. Because rather than a fixed line between subjects, the boundaries are fuzzy.

So far, we have used the words ‘psychology’ and ‘research’ in an academic sense. Compared with pop psychology books, academic ones can feel ‘dry and detached’. Usually, academic papers are written in the passive voice – from a third person perspective. It is because what is being done is more important than who is doing it. By contrast, pop psychology is more about the doer – the guru. Self-help texts are often punchier, are more directive, and seem ‘more confident’ and ‘in your face’. Which is probably what makes them so popular!²⁸

Ideally, the use of scientific methods makes academic psychology a more cautious and conservative project. It is not geared towards scientific revolution but is more to do with small advances. It aims to be a collective aspiration of ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’.²⁹ Research findings are scrutinized and reviewed by peers when published in journals. It is a slow process. Also, academic writing is an appeal to the intellect, while self-books, more likely, appeal to the emotions. Pop psychology authors might also refer to their ‘research’, but it is not always clear what this means. It could be a survey, a show-of-hands in their workshops, a collection of anecdotes, or a literature review. Their description of the research method might no...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: defining wellbeing, psychology, and the self
• 2 Questions of trust: the truth about wellbeing
• 3 Storytelling and sense-making: 50 shades of wellbeing
• 4 Stress and coping: on being well in yourself
• 5 Self-help and wellbeing: ifs, nots, myths, and knots
• 6 Happiness, meaning, and the good life: the structure of wellbeing
• 7 Some concluding thoughts …: stories, questions, and reflections on being well and getting better
• Further reading
• Notes