Going deeper on wellbeing

In Australia, the last decade or so has seen rapid growth in programs intended to help people cultivate wellbeing. Such programs have a useful role to play. In past years, health promotion and disease prevention strategies focused mostly on smoking, alcohol, exercise and diet. Today’s wellbeing programs fill a gap in these strategies by focusing on psychological wellbeing (from here on, I will just say ‘wellbeing’). They may aim to strengthen positive feelings, reduce mental suffering, promote flourishing, or improve coping with everyday challenges. And, in practice, depending on the program, they do seem to deliver some such benefits for their participants, and that’s a good thing.

However, notwithstanding their merits, there is also a substantial piece missing from these program’s working conceptions of wellbeing itself and how it works. By filling in this piece, there is potential to combine wellbeing programs with other public health strategies and build a stronger foundation of evidence. In this article I’ll give examples of current wellbeing programs, outline what I think is missing in their approach, and present some reasons why ‘going deeper’ on wellbeing is worthwhile.

Examples of wellbeing programs

Among the many possible examples of wellbeing programs, here are just three:

The Big Five: This program, developed by Mindspot, aims to improve participants’ wellbeing through skills and activities in five areas: meaningful activities, healthy thinking, goals and plans, healthy routines, and social connections.

Positive Psychology: The ‘PERMA’ approach to wellbeing popularised by Martin Seligman aims to teach skills and practices in five areas: positive emotion, engagement (i.e. being absorbed in a task), relationships, meaning, and accomplishment.   

Five Ways to Wellbeing: This South Australian program encourages people to be active in (again) five areas: connecting in relationships, being physically active, learning new things, taking notice (similar to mindfulness), and giving through acts of kindness to others.

(Apparently five is the magic number!) These and similar approaches to wellbeing have two common characteristics which are understandable given their aims but also limit their perspective. First, they focus on teaching individuals to adopt attitudes and ideas to help them to improve their own wellbeing. They largely avoid questions about the circumstances of people’s lives in present-day societies and how these may affect wellbeing. Second, they apply concepts and strategies formulated in the language of psychology, describing thoughts, feelings or behaviours which people might recognise in themselves.

A deeper view of wellbeing

There are ways to deepen understanding by going ‘beneath’ the level of psychological description, to explore the operations of the brain contributing to or detracting from wellbeing. Elsewhere, I have described these processes in some detail, drawing on relevant evidence. The key points for this article are as follows. There are several brain functions contributing to everyday social intelligence and behaviour. One of these is the stress arousal system; every person on the planet has one, built in and operational from birth. The adaptive role of this system is to trigger short term arousal in brain and body in response to perceived threats. Early in life, stress arousal responds to basic stimuli such as loud noises, angry faces and unexpected events. For adults involved in goal-directed behaviour in social settings (which is most of us) two further kinds of situation trigger rapid stress arousal: a perceived loss of ability to cope with or control one’s circumstances, and perceived negative attitudes or behaviours from other people toward oneself.

Chronic stress occurs when a person is exposed to stressful circumstances over time and cannot see any way to resolve or avoid them. It results in changes in the brain and body harmful to both mental and physical health. It is a basic physiological cause of feelings of mental distress.

Conditions of living likely to cause chronic stress include poverty or financial distress, housing or job insecurity, unemployment, social isolation, experiences of discrimination, coercive control or violence, relationship breakdown, excessive work demands, or exposure to toxic disinformation online.

Stress arousal is like a fulcrum between wellbeing and ill-being. When we are coping with our circumstances, dealing well with short-term stressors, and enjoying supportive relationships these are part of wellbeing. Wellbeing activities, such as creative engagement, contact with nature or spending time with friends are beneficial, in part, because they reduce stress. When the balance tips toward loss of coping and negative attitudes from others, and when acute stress becomes chronic, the result is psychological distress, potentially extending into poor mental health or harmful social behaviours. Which way the balance tips for any one person will be determined through interactions with their social environment over the life course.

Why it matters

Wellbeing programs such as those above don’t need to delve into all this ‘background’ information. But this ‘deeper’ perspective on wellbeing is important nonetheless for anyone wanting to promote wellbeing widely, for several reasons:

1. It provides a bridge between individualised wellbeing promotion and evidence on social determinants of mental health. Severe or chronic stress are key ‘mechanisms’ in brain and body, converting exposure to adverse circumstances into internal effects on mental and physical health. At a 2026 Preventive Mental Health Conference several speakers highlighted the importance of connecting these two dimensions of mental health/wellbeing.

2. It provides a way to specify basic, positive social conditions needed for the development and exercise of wellbeing – the social determinants of wellbeing – which can then become targets for community or governmental actions.

3. It challenges our society’s highly medicalised and failing approach to mental ‘health’, which is in fact overwhelmingly focused on ill-health. Again – in a different way – the medical approach is highly individualised, defining the problem in terms of a person’s genetic dispositions, brain chemistry or aberrant thinking and failing to recognise the impacts of social conditions.

4. It offers understanding of why stress-inducing conditions of early childhood can undermine mental health over the whole life course.

5. It highlights socially induced chronic stress as a common factor contributing to a raft of mental and physical health problems across our society.

In the end, a deeper theoretical account of wellbeing and how it is shaped by social conditions is both possible and desirable; to support coherent, holistic approaches to promoting wellbeing for individuals, families, workplaces, communities, and whole societies. I would welcome dialogue with wellbeing promotion practitioners to explore this potential.