Domains of Proactive, Holistic Wellness
Research in positive psychology, flourishing, and well-being confirms that deep thriving requires a broader view of wellness than physical or mental health alone.* Comprehensive wellness efforts across multiple domains produces correspondingly safe, social, whole-hearted, whole-bodied, whole-minded, and whole-spirited people. Because the domains are so interconnected and mutually supportive, enriching any one domain enriches them all. Additional areas such as sexual, financial, or vocational well-being can be found within other domains (e.g., physical, safety, and eudaimonic).
Safety: Essential Needs and Freedoms highlights basic needs, freedom from harm, and plain old freedom as a foundation on which to build other domains.
Social Well-Being: Relationships, Community, and Belonging explores the cardinal domain of human connection for wellness individually and in groups.
Eudaimonia: Meaning, Excellence, Growth, and Authenticity combines our sense of self, purpose, growth, and achievement as related routes to self-actualized well-being.
Resilience: Transforming Challenge into Thriving explores this surprisingly vital capacity to find wellness, growth, and even flow, in adversity.
Cognitive Well-Being: Mental and Intellectual Health addresses the familiar area of mental health but also optimal experience and mindful engagement with life.
Emotional Well-Being: Hedonia and Beyond starts with feeling good and adds on ways to expand and enrich our emotional world, rewiring the heart for optimal well-being.
Environmental Well-Being: Wellness with the Natural World cultivates well-being within the vital connection to nature, in the context of the current environmental crisis.
Physical Well-Being: Healthy Bodies, Balanced Lifestyles bolsters the familiar areas of diet, sleep, exercise, and healthy behaviors in the backdrop of a youth health epidemic.
Spiritual Well-Being: Transcendence, Union, and Peace intersects with every other domain, inviting a merging of the universal with our embodied, everyday life.
* “The 10 Domains of Well-Being – Stanford BeWell.” Stanford BeWell, April 24, 2017. https://bewell.stanford.edu/domains-well-being/; Huppert and So. “Flourishing across Europe.”; Seligman, Martin E. P., and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. “Positive Psychology: An Introduction.” In Flow and the Foundations of Positive Psychology (Springer, Dordrecht, 2014), 279–98.