How we fundamentally misunderstand ‘well-being’ | Mary Helen Immordino-Yang

Often we think about well-being as the absence of disease, the absence of mental illness, the absence of strife—but the neuroscience and also the developmental social science help us to understand that the origins of well-being is really about balance.

It's about an ability and a flexibility to manage oneself. Well-being is both a capacity and a state. And the brain data really help us to understand the contributions to that capacity and state.

A concept like well-being is not applied to a person. It's conjured within the person by their own actions, by their own dispositions of mind. And that shifts the way in which we support a person in developing well-being and becoming well.

I think there are practical things that you can do to support your own well-being strategically. Prioritizing the quality of the relationships that you have with the people around you, whom you care about. Setting yourself up to have control over certain kinds of social media use, certain kinds of, sort of scrolling; these kind of addictive things that sort of suck you in to a pattern of appetitive of wanting more and pull you out of a space where you can kind of reflect and just sort of be; and construct meaningful stories about how that's happening and what that feels like.

Privileging the things that you really enjoy doing with the people you really enjoy being with. Taking the time to reflect and to think about what it's all for, and to then enact that. Giving to others, being engaged with others, we reap back the benefits of that.

So if we really want to think about a modernized understanding of well-being, we want to think about the degree to which people have agency in their own lives to enact the things that matter to them, the degree to which they feel connected to community, they feel purposeful. The degree to which the stories that they build together with those around them are stories of agency, of deep connection, of meaning, and of a life that reflects the potentials and the possibilities that are coming next.