Improving your subjective wellbeing: an overview
Originally published on the EA Forum. This is a living review that we intend to regularly update and improve.
Summary
This Effective Self-Help report is intended to help you improve your subjective wellbeing (SWB), by sharing key actionable findings from happiness research, and presenting you a ranked list of the best interventions you can follow to be happier.
We start with a general discussion on improving SWB to give an overview of some of the most effective ways to improve it. What we mean by subjective wellbeing is “the extent to which a person believes or feels that their life is going well, from the perspective of their own evaluation of the quality of their life”. High levels of SWB are associated with better health, relationships, work performance, and fewer mental health problems.
A few broad factors seem particularly important to explain how happy we are: genetic predispositions, fulfilment of fundamental physical, psychological and social needs, and living in a prosperous community. More specifically, it matters a lot for SWB to have good physical health, no mental health problems, as well as having satisfying employment and intimate relationships.
Broad general recommendations for improving your SWB are: 1) take care of your mental health, 2) develop a healthy lifestyle, 3) build positive relationships, and 4) focus on making progress on well-chosen goals.
Our research methodology, of which we give a detailed account further down, led us to review 48 meta-analyses and systematic reviews on the effectiveness of 20 different happiness interventions. After some brief advice on how to implement them, we describe the 20 interventions, that we divided in four categories based on their promisingness and evidence base:
The most promising interventions with a strong evidence base we found are Mindfulness, the Best Possible Self intervention, Compassion interventions, Physical activity, and Multi-component Positive Psychology Interventions.
Interventions we view as promising and with a strong evidence base but a smaller effect size are Using character strengths, Acts of kindness, Gratitude, Singular Positive Psychology interventions, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT).
We view Leisure, Sleep, Contact with nature, Yoga and Expressive writing as the most promising interventions with a weaker evidence base.
Lastly, we conclude that Forgiveness interventions, Reminiscence interventions and Pleasurable experiences are promising interventions with a weaker evidence base and a smaller effect size.
Introduction
Being happier can have numerous benefits for your health and productivity, in addition to being valuable in itself. We reviewed 20 interventions across 48 meta-analyses and systematic reviews, and found that practising mindfulness meditation, following the Best Possible Self intervention, and compassion interventions are among the most promising ways to increase subjective wellbeing (SWB).
We focus on directly testable interventions. These are usually short-term and generic, in the sense that they are not tailored to your specific situation: most of these interventions are one-size-fits-all and tested on the general population. There are obviously many ways to improve your SWB that fall outside this scope, so we encourage you to take a longer-term perspective too and consider your own life circumstances.
If you’re short on time, we suggest you to directly consult the section Discussion of the Most promising interventions with the strongest evidence base, and then the section Improving subjective wellbeing: a general discussion. In an attempt to maintain its level of rigour and keep it fairly dense, this article is heavy in footnotes, which often give more information on the cited studies and allow for a deeper dive into the content.
Important note: Persistent low mood can be the sign of an underlying mental health issue that should take precedence and may require professional support.
Summary of our findings
The summary table below offers a concise overview of our top five findings, ranked in order of effect size. For a more comprehensive background to these results, including links to each study we reviewed, please see our evidence spreadsheet.
Improving subjective wellbeing: a general discussion
Research on wellbeing is a vast area of study, covered primarily by psychology as well as economics, with more than 55,000 new publications each year. It is thus only possible here to give a very brief summary of some of the most important or useful findings, with a focus on the benefits of SWB and its predictors.
We recommend this Nature review article for a broad, high-level and recent overview of key areas and conclusions in SWB research, and it is from this that we draw a lot of the information in this section. Alternatively, the Handbook of Well-being provides an in-depth overview of the area, including numerous research discoveries relevant to improving one’s own wellbeing.
What do we mean by subjective wellbeing?
In the academic literature, subjective wellbeing generally refers to the extent to which a person believes or feels that their life is going well, from the perspective of their own evaluation of the quality of their life.
Researchers often distinguish the evaluative (or cognitive) dimension of SWB, typically assessed by people’s appraisal of their satisfaction with life, from its experiential (or affective) one, referring to moment to moment wellbeing, as reflected by frequent positive affect and infrequent negative affect.
SWB can itself be contrasted with psychological wellbeing (or sometimes more broadly eudaimonic wellbeing), the latter being defined as desirable psychological characteristics such as autonomy, environmental mastery, personal growth, personal relationships, purpose in life, and self-acceptance.
Although it may depend on how one precisely defines it, happiness is frequently considered to simply be the colloquial or popular term for SWB.
For an introductory discussion on the measurement of wellbeing, see this report by the Happier Lives Institute, as well the review paper by Diener et al. (2018b) and their Table 1 in particular for a definition of the main terms related to wellbeing used in research.
In this report, we focus predominantly on SWB, as opposed to psychological wellbeing, in large part because it is from this stream of research that we found the most evidence, which may reflect a higher level of interest among researchers. The section The choice of which wellbeing outcomes to use gives more details on our choice of wellbeing measures for evaluating interventions.
The benefits of being happy
Even though the value of taking action to feel happier should be self-explanatory, let us nevertheless present a wealth of research that has linked high SWB to positive outcomes in various dimensions of life. Some of the findings with the strongest evidence base are the following:
- SWB positively influences health and longevity, probably in large part through effects on health behaviours and on the cardiovascular and immune systems.
- Feeling happy leads to better social relationships, whether with friends, romantic partners, at work or in terms of broader civic engagement.
- Higher life satisfaction and positive affect are associated with better work performance. This can be explained through the influence of SWB on the health, absenteeism, self-regulation, motivation, creativity, relationships, and job turnover of workers, all of them being outcomes for which wellbeing is beneficial.
- Although the evidence base seems weaker for this aspect, good levels of wellbeing and positive emotions can be viewed as a buffer against mental health problems and an important contributor to resilience. For instance, happy people likely recover quicker from stressful events, are protected against the negative effects of stress, and have a lower likelihood of developing a mental illness.
So on top of being an obvious intrinsic goal for most people, viewing it as “extremely important”, happiness appears to be beneficial across many areas of life.
There is some debate around the optimal level of SWB, since, for example, “for achievement activities such as earning high college grades and high income, moderately high SWB was optimal, and above that there was a small falling-off”, and since “momentary negative emotions can in some instances be helpful”. It is also worth noting that a substantial part of this cited research is non-experimental, which should make us more uncertain about whether improving your wellbeing will directly result in these benefits.
A focus on wellbeing is probably not the best way to make progress towards other goals
Despite these substantial benefits, it’s worth keeping in mind that it would be surprising if the best interventions specifically targeted at improving wellbeing also happened to be the best for close but distinct objectives, such as alleviating a specific mental illness, like reducing depression.
In particular, if you suffer from a mental health problem that you want to deal with, it probably makes more sense to try to tackle the issue directly rather than using “improving SWB” as a proxy goal.
Similarly, the best strategies to feel happier aren’t necessarily the same as the best ones to increase your productivity, even if the gap between the two goals is probably smaller than is sometimes assumed.
With that said, the following points apply in relation to mental health:
- We haven’t methodically collected the evidence for this, but at least some of our recommended interventions for improving SWB also have a positive effect on conditions like depression and anxiety. As an illustration, van Agteren et al. (2021) are encouraging healthcare practitioners to integrate wellbeing enhancing interventions in their treatment of mental illnesses.
- It has been argued, with some empirical support, that if we view the entire distribution of a population’s mental health as a continuum, then, shifting the population mean upwards (with e.g. happiness interventions) should be associated with a significant reduction in the prevalence of common mental disorders.
What determines our happiness?
Providing anything close to a comprehensive summary of the factors that play an influential role in determining our level of SWB – its determinants, or correlates – is beyond the scope of this report. We can however point to some major results found in the literature, as well as provide a sense of their relative importance in explaining why our wellbeing is at a certain level.
Genetics vs. environment
Firstly, genetic predispositions play an important role in explaining the differences in SWB between individuals. Estimates from heritability studies indicate that about 30 to 40% of this variance in SWB is due to genetic factors. While significant, this still leaves about 60 to 70% of SWB attributable to environmental effects, emphasising the value of thoughtful life choices and actions. This view is defended in greater detail in Sheldon and Lyubomirsky (2019).
Fundamental human needs
Secondly, the fulfilment of some fundamental human “needs” seems conducive to high levels of SWB: Diener and Tay (2011) found, from a large survey covering all sociocultural regions of the world, that having universal needs met was consistently associated with SWB.
They conceptualised and examined six needs: (1) basic needs for food and shelter, (2) safety and security, (3) social support and love, (4) feeling respected and pride in activities, (5) mastery, (6) autonomy and self-direction.
Among them, life satisfaction was most strongly associated with basic and social needs, positive emotions with respect and social needs, and negative feelings with respect and autonomy needs.
Sheldon and Lyubomirsky (2019) suggest in their proposed Positive Activity Model that psychological need satisfaction is one mechanism through which positive practices and activities work to boost wellbeing. For instance, the benefits of expressing gratitude may partly come from an increase in social connectedness, since sharing grateful thoughts and feelings helps form deeper bonds.
The world around you
Thirdly, several community and societal factors are associated with SWB, such as living in a country with lower inequality and corruption, more political freedoms, as well as in a less polluted area and near green spaces.
As for the role of economic factors, robust evidence shows that national income is strongly associated with SWB, but note that there is considerable discussion and debate on this topic – including, but not limited to, the famous Easterlin paradox – which we won’t go into here. This 80,000 Hours article from 2016 reviews some evidence on personal income and happiness (in the context of career choice, they write: “We think the message is clear: if you want a satisfying career, once you’re earning above about $40,000, don’t focus on earning more money.”), but strong conclusions around this topic are unwise. This more recent EA Forum article reviews new research on the same topic.
Personal circumstances
Fourthly, specific personal life circumstances do have an influence on SWB, with changes in some of them producing lasting changes (see just below for more details on the importance of various life circumstances). While people on average adapt to marriage after some time and having children isn’t associated with higher SWB, becoming a widow, unemployed, or disabled is linked to lower SWB for a longer term.
Which of these circumstances is most influential in improving subjective wellbeing?
To answer this question, Frijters et al. (2020) used cross-sectional data from the representative British Household Panel Survey. They estimated the fraction of the variance of adult life satisfaction explained by different socioeconomic factors, or in simpler terms the most influential happiness factors.
The factors they included explained only 19% of the total variation, so many other factors were left out. The most influential factor was health : mental health – in this case being diagnosed with depression or anxiety – explained a considerable 46% of the fraction of the variance, and physical health explained 15%. This was followed by social connections factors, namely having a partner (15%), being employed (8%), and income (10%).
Frijters et al. (2020) also compiled a list of effects on life satisfaction of various individual circumstances and policy changes (their Table 1). It is originally presented as an aid for political decision-making and the evidence base is mostly not directly experimental, their results mainly coming from observational studies or natural experiments. Yet it can still be useful to get a first sense of the magnitude of variation in life satisfaction we can expect from several personal life changes (which are not the same as our reviewed interventions).
The changes with the highest effect on life satisfaction, with “(+)” for positive effect and “(-)” for a negative one, were, in decreasing order: going from healthy to a poor physical health (-), going from depression to full mental health (+), going from employed to unemployed (-), going from unemployed to the out-of-labour force (+), going from partnered to separated (-), being a victim of a violent crime (-) and doubling one’s household income (+).
Geerling and Diener (2020) also used survey data to get insight into what factors contribute more or less to SWB. The data comes from the large Gallup World Poll, which includes a representative sample of adults from 166 nations. They calculated the “percent range”, i.e. the difference between the highest and lowest point, of three SWB scales – life satisfaction, positive affect and negative affect – covered by groups of different factors.
The factors that covered the highest percentage range for life satisfaction were nationality with 45% (i.e. 45% of the life satisfaction scale was covered by differences between the most extreme nations in terms of life satisfaction), followed by income, social support, basic needs and health satisfaction. The most influential factors, in this specific sense, for positive affect were social support, nationality, health satisfaction and income. For negative affect, nationality, social support, health satisfaction and health problems were most influential.
Broad recommendations
In addition to the interventions we reviewed in more detail and present in the section of the report on the best interventions, we propose here a few broad recommendations that we think it makes sense to follow or keep in mind if you want to improve your wellbeing. They differ from the reviewed interventions in one or both of these two dimensions:
1) They are wider and less targeted. The wellbeing interventions we reviewed are mostly about specific and directly testable methods or procedures, often that you can follow for a limited period. Instead, the advice just below should be seen as general guidelines helpful for setting up a solid basis for a happy life.
2) We applied a different standard for the evidence base. Even though we tried to ensure that the advice in this section rests on the most solid and recent evidence, it is not exclusively based on meta-analyses of experimental studies, but also on non-experimental data and individual randomised control trials (RCTs), many of which have been mentioned in the preceding section.
Furthermore, the criteria we used for the ordering of these broad recommendations are looser. Roughly speaking, they encompass: (a) how broadly applicable the recommendation is, (b) how strong the evidence (taking into account indications of magnitude of effect) is, and (c) how well it aligns with the sensible advice commonly given by high–quality sources, as well as experts’ views.
Here we will only cover the basics, but we recommend you explore the cited sources for more details and application tips. None of these ideas are surprising, yet it can be valuable to be reminded of the most notable ones and receive confirmation of their evidence base.
Take care of your mental health
Since “the biggest single predictor of individual happiness is mental health”, taking steps towards the diagnosis and (professionally supported) treatment of potential mental health conditions or difficulties you may have is likely to be a highly worthwhile endeavour for your SWB. As written above, even if you might find suggestions among our recommendations useful, it would probably be best to follow the specific recommendations for the mental health issue you might be struggling with. Official guidelines from trustworthy institutions like the NHS offer a good place to start.
Develop healthy habits
This is pretty evident, but it can be easy to start thinking that the solution for a higher life satisfaction and more positive emotions lie in complicated changes, when in fact relatively simple improvements in lifestyle and health habits would already have a great effect.
Regular physical activity, a healthy diet (including the obvious eating more fruits and vegetables), sufficient quality sleep, and limited consumption of harmful substances form the basis of good physical health and its preservation, which has a strong influence on SWB, as we mentioned above. Developing such healthy habits is likely to produce significant improvements to your wellbeing. While beyond the scope of this report, we hope further research will enable us to better differentiate the relative value of these different lifestyle changes and the best approaches available.
Build positive relationships
Across the evidence we reviewed, quality social relationships were consistently highlighted as an essential ingredient of high SWB. Beyond obvious actions like spending enjoyable time with friends and family, the following suggestions can give you some ideas to develop satisfying social bonds and sustain or strengthen existing ones:
- Join a social group, such as by volunteering, with a focus on the social connections and satisfaction it brings rather than the impact accrued.
- Improve your social skills.
- Learn to respond enthusiastically to good news shared by your close ones, as it is associated with several benefits, like greater positive emotions and relationship satisfaction for both people in the interaction.
You can find basic advice on “social wellness” on the NIH website, and on intimate relationships on the NHS-recommended website of the charity Relate (see also this NHS page on relationships advice).
Focus on making progress towards carefully chosen goals
As goal progress has been significantly associated with SWB at the meta-analytical level, working towards important goals you may have can by itself provide benefits to your happiness, in addition to the direct benefits you get from goal advancement.
To get the most out of goal striving in terms of SWB, and mainly based on two literature reviews on the topic, we advise you to, in order of importance:
1) Focus on the process of goal pursuit, i.e. the progress you’re making, rather than on the desired outcomes of the goal – in other words, the means to pursue the goals (“running”), not the ends (“better endurance”).
2) Choose autonomously selected (or generated) self-concordant goals, namely goals that you believe are intrinsically important to have and that bring you fun and enjoyment, rather than ones pursued only because of external pressure or coercion.
3) Choose approach and not avoidance goals.
4) Choose goals aimed at satisfying psychological needs (in particular affective needs), feelings and implicit motives such as autonomy, competence, social relatedness and self-acceptance, rather than extrinsic goals like an appealing appearance or financial success.
5) Stick to realistically attainable goals given your resources that won’t conflict too hard with your other goals (e.g. allowing you to find balance in your activities) and from which you’re ready to disengage in cases where their pursuit becomes too costly or less relevant.
Having said that, you can use the various recommendations in this article to devise happiness conducive goals, such as developing physical and mental health positive habits, taking steps for a more fulfilling social life or following our recommended interventions. Note however that some findings indicate that explicitly striving for SWB directly does not work well.
This leads Sheldon and Lyubomirsky (2019) to instead recommend a focus on “eudaimonic” type activities (i.e. growth-promoting and intentional goals and behaviours, focused on long-term self-improvement and connections with others) which tend to bring SWB as a kind of side effect.
As for goals concerning a change in your life circumstances, let us stress two points. First, it can useful to keep in mind the relative influence of various life circumstances, in order to focus on the ones that are most important and less prone to adaptation. Second, such a focus might not be the most cost-effective way to sustainably increase your SWB.