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For centuries, happiness was exclusively a concern of the humanities; a matter for philosophers, novelists and artists. In the past five decades, however, it has moved into the domain of science and given us a substantial body of research. This wellspring of knowledge now offers us an enticing opportunity: to consider happiness as the leading measure of well-being, supplanting the current favourite, real gross domestic product per capita, or GDP.

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Today there are high hopes for technological progress. Techno-optimists expect massive benefits for humankind from the invention of new technologies. Peter Diamandis is the founder of the X-prize foundation whose purpose is to arrange competitions for breakthrough inventions.

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In the film A Christmas Story, Ralphie desperately wants “an official Red Ryder, carbine action, 200 shot range model air rifle.” His mom resists because she reckons it will damage his well-being. (“You’ll shoot your eye out!”) In the end, though, Ralphie gets the air rifle and deems it “the greatest Christmas gift I ever received, or would ever receive.”

This Christmas, why not give your friends and family the gift of well-being? Even removing an air rifle and the possibility of eye injury from the mix, that’s easier said than done.

Well-being is tough to pin down. It takes many forms. A college student, a middle-aged parent, and a spritely octogenarian might all lead very different lives and still have well-being. What’s more, you can’t wrap up well-being and tuck it under the tree. All you can do is give gifts that promote it. But what kind of gift promotes well-being?

One that establishes or strengthens the positive grooves that make up a good life. You have well-being when you’re stuck in a “positive groove” of:

• emotions (e.g., pleasure, contentment),
• attitudes (e.g., optimism, openness to new experiences),
• traits (e.g., extraversion, perseverance), and
• success (e.g., strong relationships, professional accomplishment, fulfilling projects, good health).

Your life is going well for you when you’re entangled in a success-breeds-success cycle comprised of states you find (mostly) valuable and pleasant.

Some gifts do this by producing what psychologists call flow. They immerse you in an activity you find rewarding. Flow gifts are easy to spot. They’re the ones, like Ralphie’s air rifle, that occupy you all day.

A flow gift promotes well-being by snaring you into a pleasure-mastery-success loop. A flow gift turns you inward, toward a specific activity and away from the rest of the world. It involves an activity that’s fun, that you get better at with practice, and that rewards you with success, even if that “success” is winning a video game car race.

Flow is important to a good life. It feels good, and it fosters excellence. It’s the difference between the piano-playing wiz and the kid (like me) who fizzled out. But there’s more to well-being than flow and excellence.

A bonding gift turns you outward, toward other people. A bonding gift shows how someone thinks and feels about you. In O. Henry’s short story The Gift of the Magi, a young couple, Jim and Della, sacrifice their “greatest treasures” to buy each other Christmas gifts. Della sells her luxurious long hair to buy a chain for Jim’s gold watch. And Jim sells his gold watch to buy the beautiful set of combs Della yearned for.

Bonding gifts change people’s relationships. The chain and the combs strengthen and deepen Jim and Della’s love, affection and commitment. This is why “of all who give gifts these two were the wisest.”

The bonds of love and friendship are not just emotional. They’re causal. We’re tangled up with the people we care about in self-sustaining cycles of positive feelings, attitudes, traits and accomplishments. Good relationships are shared, interpersonal positive grooves. This is why they make us better and happier people. Bonding gifts strengthen the positive groove you share with a person you care about.

You’re probably wondering whether you can find something that’s an effective bonding and flow gift. I must admit, I’ve never managed it. A tandem bike? Alas, no. Perhaps you can do better.

So this holiday season, why not give “groovy” gifts – gifts that “keep on giving” by ensnaring your loved ones in cascading cycles of pleasure and value.

Image credit: Stockphotography wrapping paper via Hubspot.

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Why are people afraid to get old? Research shows that having a bad attitude toward aging at a young age is only detrimental to the young person’s health and well-being in the long-run. Contrary to common wisdom, our sense of well-being actually increases with our age–often even in the presence of illness or disability. Mindy Greenstein, PhD, and Jimmie Holland, MD, debunk the myth that growing older is something to fear in their new book Lighter as We Go: Virtues, Character Strengths, and Aging. In the following videos, Dr. Greenstein and Dr. Holland are joined by Holland’s granddaughter Madeline in a thought-provoking discussion about their different perspectives on aging in correlation to well-being.

The Relationship between Wisdom and Age

The Bridge between Older People and Younger Generations

On Fluctuations in Well-Being throughout Life

The Vintage Readers Book Club

Headline image credit: Cloud Sky over Brest. Photo by Luca Lorenzi. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

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By Claire Niedzwiedz

How satisfied are you with your life? The answer is undoubtedly shaped by many factors and one key influence is the country in which you live. Governments across the world are increasingly interested in measuring happiness and well-being to understand how societies are changing, as indicators such as GDP (gross domestic product) do not seem to measure what makes life meaningful. Indeed, some countries, such as Bhutan, have measured national happiness for many years. In the World Map of Happiness below, the countries in green (such as Sweden) have the highest satisfaction. The blue countries are less happy than the green, followed by the pink and orange, and finally the red countries (such as Russia) have the lowest satisfaction. The map conjures up all sorts of interesting questions, like what would the map look like if only older or younger people were included or does happiness vary much within a country?

A U-shaped relationship between age and life satisfaction is often reported, meaning that people are happiest in their 20s and their 60s. But what are the factors that help older people achieve high life satisfaction? Research in this area is particularly important as a result of increasing life expectancy and growth in the proportion of older people. Measuring average well-being is only one side of the story, however. Countries which have high levels of overall life satisfaction may have large inequalities between the richest and poorest in society.

What type of country fosters a more equitable distribution of well-being? This is the focus of our paper recently published in Age and Ageing. We studied the influence of socioeconomic position on life satisfaction in over 17,000 people aged 50 to 75 years old from 13 European countries participating in the Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). To measure socioeconomic position, we used a number of different measures that reflected their position in society at different stages of their life. By looking at their relative position in their own country’s social hierarchy, we created a scale that enabled comparison between countries and across the life course measures. From childhood, we looked at the number of books people reported they had when they were aged 10 years old, a measure of the family’s cultural and economic resources. Education level was used as a measure of early adulthood social position and current wealth was taken as a measure of economic position at the time of the survey. We grouped countries into four categories based on the characteristics of their welfare policy and looked at whether socioeconomic inequalities in life satisfaction varied by the type of welfare state a country fits into.

Intriguingly, we found that Scandinavian (Sweden and Denmark) followed by Bismarckian countries (Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Austria, and France) had both higher life satisfaction and narrower differences in well-being between those at the top and bottom of society. Scandinavian countries are traditionally characterised by their high levels of welfare provision, universalism, and the promotion of social equality. Bismarckian countries are characterised by welfare states that maintain existing social divisions in society, in which social security is often related to one’s earnings and administered via the employer. Southern (Greece, Italy, and Spain) and Post-communist (Poland and the Czech Republic) countries, which tend to have less generous welfare states, had lower life satisfaction and larger social inequalities in life satisfaction. The number of books in childhood was a significant predictor of quality of life in early old age in all welfare states, apart from the Scandinavian type, and the relationship was particularly strong among women in the Southern countries. On the whole, however, inequalities in life satisfaction were largest by current wealth across the majority of welfare states.

Our findings have important implications, especially given the welfare policy changes taking place across Europe and the growth in wealth inequalities. It raises questions about how future generations of people are going to experience their early old age. Will average well-being and inequalities between the richest and poorest change as less welfare support is available? What will be the impact of increases in the retirement age? It is clear that these are urgent questions which affect us all and that the policies governments pursue are likely to shape the answers.

Claire Niedzwiedz (@claire_niedz) is a final year doctoral researcher at the University of Glasgow’s Institute of Health and Wellbeing and is part of the Centre for Research on the Environment, Society and Health (CRESH). They tweet at @CRESHnews. She is the author of the paper ‘The association between life course socioeconomic position and life satisfaction in different welfare states: European comparative study of individuals in early old age’, published in the journal Age and Ageing.

Age and Ageing is an international journal publishing refereed original articles and commissioned reviews on geriatric medicine and gerontology. Its range includes research on ageing and clinical, epidemiological, and psychological aspects of later life.

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Image credit: Satisfaction with Life Index Map coloured according to The World Map of Happiness, Adrian White, Analytic Social Psychologist, University of Leicester. Public domain via Wikimedia commons

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By Maureen Duffy

What do we mean when talk about workplace health and well-being these days? How well are we doing in achieving it?

Traditionally, the notion of employee health and well-being was about protecting workers from hazards in the workplace and insuring physical safety. From this early focus on the physical safety and health of workers, the concept of workplace health evolved to include the protection and promotion of personal physical health and well-being. Corporate wellness programs emphasizing health promoting behaviors like smoking cessation, weight loss, exercise and nutrition, and management of chronic diseases like diabetes fall into this category.

More recently, the idea of employee health and well-being has evolved to include protection and promotion of the psychological safety of workers, the sustainability of the organization itself, and active participation in health promotion of the local community. The World Health Organization developed a definition of workplace health and well-being that includes all of these dimensions. Grounded in research, it defines a healthy workplace as: “one in which workers and managers collaborate to use a continual improvement process to protect and promote the health, safety and well-being of all workers and the sustainability of the workplace by considering the following, based on identified needs:

• health and safety concerns in the physical work environment;
• health, safety and well-being concerns in the psychosocial work environment, including organization of work and workplace culture;
• personal health resources in the workplace; and
• ways of participating in the community to improve the health of workers, their families and other members of the community.”

The World Health Organization’s is not the only definition of workplace health and well-being but it’s a good starting point for conversation.

“Who are clinical social workers?” ACSWA. Photo Courtesy of Maureen Duffy via iStockphoto.

Employee health and well-being, especially psychological and emotional health, could be faring a whole lot better than it is. To start with, the Gallup Organization, in its most recent worldwide survey of employee engagement found that only 29% of North American employees were engaged, and this low number represented the highest rate of engagement among all regions of the world surveyed. That leaves 70% of North American employees unmotivated and disconnected, to some degree or another, from their work and workplaces. Add to widespread lack of engagement the results of the 2014 Workplace Bullying Institute’s US workplace bullying survey indicating that 27% of Americans surveyed had personally experienced repeated mistreatment and abusive conduct at work and an additional 21% reported witnessing it. Especially from the perspective of psychological heath, well-being, and safety, the findings from these two recent surveys paint a gloomy picture and suggest that modern organizational life is in trouble.

A helpful way of improving psychological health, well-being, and safety in the workplace is through the implementation of guiding principles to make the organization more resistant to workplace bullying, mobbing, and abuse. These principles are values-driven, action-oriented, and structure-sensitive.

Guiding Principle #1: Place values like empathy, respect, and ethical communication at the center of organizational life.

• Empathy is the lens through which co-workers, customers and people served, and complex situations are viewed. What does this situation mean for this person or these people? What is it like to be this co-worker, this manager, this customer, this patient, this student, this teacher, in this situation, and what can this organization do to improve the experiences for each of them? Such deep empathy guides problem assessment and solution-building. The design and innovation company, IDEO is a wonderful example of a company that is built around the value of active empathy.
• Respect is the value that guides how we treat each other, acknowledge each other’s presence, and recognize each other’s contributions to fulfilling the organizational mission. Practicing respect also allows for embracing diversity and accepting differences. Some work futurists who want to embrace the power of diversity to push innovation and solution-building endorse moving away from consensus models toward dissensus models. In dissensus models, hidden, differing, or even critical perspectives about an organizational situation or challenge are actively sought and gathered. Dissensus models take outlier views into account, thereby including all viewpoints, thus avoiding some of the pitfalls of consensus-building and groupthink. While respect as a value is written into many organizational mission statements and codes of conduct, it is worth remembering what the cybernetician and organizational theorist, Stafford Beer, cautioned; namely, that a work system is what it does (not necessarily what it says it does). Whether respect is actually practiced as a value in an organization shows up in how people both talk about one another and act toward one another.
• Ethical communication brings together the values of empathy and respect and is the single most important way of aligning these values with behavior to reduce and prevent mobbing, bullying, and other forms of workplace abuse. Ethical communication offers a map for how to talk with others when they are present and how to talk about them when they are not. Ethical communication in the workplace excludes gossip, backstabbing, shunning and ostracizing, applying pejorative labels about the personalities or personal lives of others, and shutting people out of critical information loops necessary to do their jobs. Ethical communication includes transparency and openness among all organizational members irrespective of rank. The late Michael White, a renowned narrative therapist, adhered to a principle of ethical communication in conducting therapy that, if applied within organizations, would go a long way toward reducing workplace abuse, mobbing, and bullying. The principle that White rigorously adhered to was only talking about clients in their absence as he would in their presence—no matter who the third party was or how influential or powerful. Imagine how different and how much psychologically safer organizational life would be if everyone in the organization adopted Michael White’s principle of ethical communication!

Guiding Principle #2: Keep an action orientation toward the mission, tasks, goals, projects, and purpose of the organization.

In other words, this principle is about doing the work of the organization at full throttle every day. The work of the organization is not the perpetuation of the organization despite appearances to the contrary in a number of cases. The work of the organization is to provide goods and services that benefit and please end-users while inspiring those involved in their creation and production. Workers who are inspired, active, and involved are much more likely to work with each other rather than against each other as happens in workplace bullying, mobbing, and abuse.

Guiding Principle #3: Pay attention to structure sensitivity and how the organizational structure impacts the productivity of the organization and well-being of its personnel.

Suggesting that organizations pay attention to their own structures and modify or change them when they no longer seem to serve either the end-users or organizational members might seem like a tall order. But it’s a tall order that’s catching on. Zappos, an online shoe and clothing store with over 1,500 employees, is abandoning hierarchy, bosses, and management as we have come to know it in favor of a non-hierarchical, distributed system of power called Holacracy. Other companies are already using the Holacracy model and still others are utilizing structures that rely on networks and self-organizing systems rather than on bureaucracy and hierarchy. Traditional hierarchical organizational structures rely on outdated methods of control that are authoritarian in nature, even when benignly so, and emphasize obedience, conformity, and punishment. Caring for the psychological health and well-being of employees and, indeed all organizational members, may in the final analysis include serious attention to organizational structure and the possibility of structural change. Such structural sensitivity and change may also be required to rid our workplaces of bullying and mobbing and their destructive effects on the individual and the organization.

The news about organizational life and about emotional and psychological well-being within organizations is not good. Creating organizations that are more humane and that are inviting and exciting places to spend so much of our time is worth our biggest thinking and our willingness to dare to make them better.

Maureen Duffy is a consultant about workplace and school issues, including mobbing and bullying, a family therapist and educator and is the co-author of Overcoming Mobbing: A Recovery Guide for Workplace Aggression and Bullying and Mobbing: Causes, Consequences, and Solutions. Read her previous blog posts.

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Parents often ask, how old do my kids need to be before I can stop reading aloud with them?  Looks like they are never too old! The Forum on Child and Family Statistics recently published America’s Children: Key National Indicators of Well-Being, 2011,  a summary of national indicators of children’s well-being and monitors changes in those indicators. One key indicator is the family reading to young children at home.  It is linked to reading development and later on,  achievement in reading comprehension and overall success in school. This study was a feature article in the recent issue of Reading Today, the International Reading Association’s bimonthly newspaper.The Florida Center for Reading Research lends support to this indicator and has made available to families recommendations to help families promote literacy development at home. Here at Sts. Peter and Paul Salesian School, our K-5 reading program– Houghton Mifflin’s The Nation’s Choice, recently upgraded to the Medallion Edition, provides recommended leveled reading lists for students (easy, on level, challenge), independent readers, and for read alouds for students in K-5.  You might want to check the lists out here, and then get the books at the public library.  Nothing like a good story to get the imagination running, dendrites clicking, and getting ready for school!

Graphic courtesy of The Eagle’s Eye