Well-being Beyond Feeling Good

2026-05-25 · misc

The American psychologist Martin Seligman is considered the “father of Positive Psychology”.

Positive Psychology, as is important to note, bears no relation at all to the non-scientific notion of “positive thinking”, and is the field of Psychology with the primary aim of studying what human beings do as an end in itself.

While most pursuits in Psychology and Psychiatry have the goal of understanding and mitigating the symptoms of mental health issues, such as anxiety and depression, Positive Psychology has the distinct goal of understanding what makes human beings flourish.

The model of human flourishing proposed by Seligman may be recalled through the acronym “PERMA”, which refers to five main contributors to well-being:

• Positive Emotions -- the expected and most common element to well-being, feeling happy in the moment.
• Engagement -- also known as the “Flow State”, a concept most associated with the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, identified as losing track of time and being totally absorbed by the task at hand.
• Relationships -- having healthy relationships with friends, family, coworkers, and others.
• Meaning -- somewhat related to Viktor Frankl's logotherapy, but taken by Seligman to mean contributing to something larger than oneself that transcends the individual, such as one's family, one's country, one's religion, or an institution.
• Achievement -- succeeding at doing something recognizably hard through effortful pursuit.

Seligman proposes that the goal of Psychology, as he sees it, is not only the palliative care of negative symptoms of mental health -- which is often a subtractive pursuit -- but, in addition to that, giving the tools to pursue well-being in one of its many forms -- an additive pursuit.

In expanding what “happiness” is commonly understood as, i.e., “feeling good”, Seligman also draws more nuance into what moves people and what nurtures deep and lasting satisfaction.

Resources

• “Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being”, by Martin Seligman (2012)