Wellbeing - seeking answers where answers are not the right thing to be seeking

As readers of this blog will know, we’ve been thinking about wellbeing a good deal this year; for many reasons. We all know what wellbeing feels like – or certainly what it feels like when it’s missing, but it's surprisingly difficult to pin down in definition.

I’ve been wondering though, if the right way to think about wellbeing is actually not as a thing to define and capture, but to seek through other things.  I'm wondering if it is like grace in a dance.  It doesn't make sense to talk about grace as separate from the dance, because grace doesn't exist on its own.  Grace is not something the dancer feels at the end of a dance, but an intrinsic accompaniment of that dance done well.  You can't separate the grace from the dance, and I'm wondering if the same goes for wellbeing in daily life - it’s not a separate thing that we can pursue, but something that arises from what Seligmann calls ‘good traffic’ with the world. That might sound odd but it’s hardly a new idea, and actually it has many echoes:

• happiness when it comes, comes incidentally - make it the object of pursuit, and it leads us a wild-goose chase, and is never attained (novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne)
• Set thy heart upon thy work, but never on its reward (Krisha tells student Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita)
• There is no effective technology for teaching feeling good which does not first teach doing well. Feelings of self esteem and happiness develop as side-effects of mastering challenges, working successfully, overcoming frustration boredom and winning. The feeling of self esteem is a byproduct of doing well (Martin Seligman)
• The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times… The best moments usually occur if a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile (psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, famous for his idea of flow)

This idea is particularly relevant in busy schools; it suggests that peak moments happen when we focus on something outside ourselves, something challenging and difficult. Hardly a new idea, that we should focus on what we are doing, rather than what we are feeling about what we are doing; on being in flow rather than on what it feels like to be in flow.

   Mental wellbeing, spiritual wellbeing, physical wellbeing, financial wellbeing, occupational wellbeing, emotional wellbeing, social wellbeing, intellectual wellbeing, career wellbeing
There seem to be so many conceptions of wellbeing, that perhaps wellbeing itself is not such a helpful lens.   But what alternatives are there?         Source

If this is right then wellbeing is by-product of good actions; not a goal in itself. In our objective oriented, KPI-focussed world, that seems rather quaint, almost silly; but it would have practical consequences.   

First of all, it certainly means that we should not be removing challenges to ‘protect’ students, because it’s through the challenges that students come to the experiences that we are talking about. 

Secondly, and perhaps more controversially, it might mean that talking much about wellbeing with students is not so helpful.   Another analogy, perhaps, is that wellbeing is like health; if you go to a doctor, it's not likely she'll talk much about health - the conversation might be about nutrition, sleep, exercise (which contribute to health) or blood-pressure, cholesterol levels, weight (which may be indictors of health).  Health itself doesn't really come into play, except as a product, an underlying abstraction of these things. Is wellbeing the same?

If so, this would explain why we are having trouble getting traction here - because wellbeing may be at too high a level of abstraction to address by itself.  That might suggest that we instead need to break it down to practical things like schedules, study-skills, sleep-patterns and exercise.  I am sure there is a lot of value in that; these are things worth addressing - but I can't help feel that despite what I have just said, there has to something missing there.   Important as these things are, they are at such a low level of granularity that I would worry we can get them all right, but still miss wellbeing.  I'm wondering if there are also alternative intermediate level concepts to consider - things like sense of belonging and connectedness, sense of autonomy and sense of competence and accomplishment, that might be things to pursue as supporting well being.  That's an area we are exploring now, based on Ryan and Deci's seminal work based on decades of experiments and data.

So far I've talked about wellbeing.  Adam Robinson extends this idea more generally - to success, or love, or happiness, for example. He argues that they key is not to look for them, because if you are paying attention to looking for them, then you are not paying enough attention to the things that will generate them. If you are looking for love, then you are likely not being very loveable. I’m not sure this is completely right, but there is something familiar here.

This approach does not provide any magic answers.   But it does, at least, frame the issue less as a problem to be solved, and more as a situation to be managed. That alone is a step forward, I think.

Reference

Dugigg, C (2019) Wealthy, Successful and Miserable.  New York Times

Ryan, R. and Deci, E. (2017). Self-Determination Theory Guilford Press