The Five-ish Pillars of Well-being

Recently, I have been a little obsessed with this notion of “well-being.” In wellness parlance, it can mean almost anything and is most often equated with what can be shoved in a bottle and sold at the highest markup. Either that, or well-being means you go about your day with a serene expression and a deep appreciation for the guy who just cut you off in traffic. I think we can build a definition that is considerably more defensible than the usual “well-being means being happy” treatment.

Based on my research, no single definition of well-being is universally accepted. The literature includes subjective, psychological, eudaimonic, flourishing, self-determination, social, physical, and culturally grounded approaches. Still, there is substantial consistency beneath the terminology (Diener, 1984; Ryan & Deci, 2001; Ryff, 2014; Martela & Sheldon, 2019).

A defensible working definition for me would be:

Well-being is the multidimensional experience of feeling reasonably well, functioning effectively, having meaningful direction, and being connected to other people, supported by the physical and social conditions that make those things sustainable.

Sounds fancy, right? I’m saying “feeling reasonably well” rather than “feeling good,” on purpose. Many people equate well-being and even health with constant positive emotion, and I don’t think that is reasonable, nor is it supported in the literature. Diener’s subjective well-being tradition includes positive and negative affect plus evaluation of one’s life, while eudaimonic traditions add purpose, growth, autonomy, relationships, competence, and self-acceptance (Diener, 1984; Ryan & Deci, 2001; Ryff, 2014). So yeah, I don’t think well-being means perpetual bliss, more like “doing ok.”

There is something else to consider. Researchers spend an inordinate amount of time dissecting terms and measuring constituent parts. A large cross-cultural psychometric study of 7,617 people from 109 countries found that commonly used measures of “hedonic” and “eudaimonic” well-being correlated (Disabato et al., 2016). Meaning, researchers can distinguish pleasure, meaning, growth, purpose, etc. conceptually, but find it hard to measure them independently. So as we dig into the idea of well-being, understand that it is multi-dimensional, but it is not easy to parse the individual dimensions from the whole.

A five-pillar model that I think the research supports:

1. Emotional well-being

This is the “how life feels” dimension: positive and negative affect, emotional experience, and overall life satisfaction. It is the classic subjective well-being component (Diener, 1984). Importantly, this does not mean eliminating sadness, anxiety, anger, or stress. It means that distress is not dominating the person's psychological life and that life is, on balance, experienced as worthwhile or satisfactory.

2. Agency and effective functioning

People tend to do better when they have a say in their own experience. Ryff's model includes autonomy and environmental mastery, while Self-Determination Theory (SDT) emphasizes autonomy and competence (Ryff, 2014; Martela & Sheldon, 2019; Vansteenkiste et al., 2020). This is not radical individualism. Autonomy in SDT means acting with volition rather than simply “doing everything yourself.”

3. Meaning, purpose, and growth

Again, Well-being is more than “happy”. Eudaimonic approaches repeatedly emphasize purpose, meaningful goals, authenticity, personal growth, and living in accordance with things one considers important (Ryan & Deci, 2001; Ryff, 2014). This has some empirical backing: an individual-participant meta-analysis covering 16 samples and more than 108,000 adults found that greater purpose in life was associated with lower subjective stress (Sutin et al., 2024).

4. Connection and belonging

This one is super important. Ryff’s model highlights positive relationships, Self-Determination Theory points to relatedness as a core psychological need, flourishing frameworks feature close connections, and reviews of adult friendship constantly link spending time with friends and having social support to overall well-being (Pezirkianidis et al., 2023; Vansteenkiste et al., 2020; Węziak-Białowolska et al., 2019).

This is broader than “have friends.” It includes belonging, intimacy, social support, mattering, and feeling meaningfully connected to other people.

5. Health, security, and supportive conditions

I would include this one, but with an asterisk because conceptually it is somewhat different from the first four. Physical health, material stability, time, safety, socioeconomic conditions, and supportive environments are partly conditions that sustain well-being, rather than subjective well-being itself. But I also think it's important to acknowledge that a sense of well-being isn't sustainable when you’re struggling to merely survive.

The Secure Flourish framework, for example, treats material/financial stability as supporting flourishing rather than equating money with flourishing (Węziak-Białowolska et al., 2019). Broader multidimensional approaches similarly incorporate physical, psychological, and social health (Pressman et al., 2013).

There is an unfortunate tendency in popular psychology to treat well-being as a matter of personal attitude while someone is sleep-deprived, financially precarious, socially isolated, chronically ill, working three jobs, and apparently expected to fix the situation with gratitude journaling.

So here is my rough model:

Emotional Well-being — How am I experiencing my life?

Agency — Can I direct and manage my life?

Meaning & Purpose — Does my life have direction and significance?

Connection & Belonging — Am I meaningfully connected to others?

Supportive Foundations — Do my health, resources, time, and environment make well-being possible?

There is also a sixth theme running through Ryff's work, self-acceptance/personal growth, but I don't think it needs its own pillar. It fits reasonably within both Agency and Meaning & Purpose. That and I am a musician and therefore find it difficult to count past the number four, so I’m already challenging myself.

One especially useful finding from the literature supports this structure indirectly. Wilkie et al. (2026) synthesized 183 randomized trials involving 22,811 adults and found that multiple kinds of interventions can improve well-being, including exercise, mindfulness, compassion practices, positive psychology, yoga, and combined psychological/exercise approaches. No single psychological method clearly dominated the others. That suggests these practices are better understood as supportive of well-being, not the definition of well-being itself. Exercise is not well-being. Mindfulness is not well-being. Gratitude is not well-being. They are great ways of supporting it.

It’s also important to keep in mind that cross-cultural evidence shows some consistency but also meaningful variation in what people consider well-being. Large international studies find that individualistic measures such as personal life satisfaction can underrepresent relationship-oriented forms of flourishing, and participatory research across 50 countries finds that communities weight well-being domains differently (Krys et al., 2023; Sollis et al., 2024). So our five pillars should be described as patterns, not “science has discovered the five universal pillars of well-being.”

References

Diener, E. (1984). Subjective well-being. Psychological Bulletin, 95(3), 542–575. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.95.3.542

Disabato, D. J., Goodman, F. R., Kashdan, T. B., Short, J. L., & Jarden, A. (2016). Different types of well-being? A cross-cultural examination of hedonic and eudaimonic well-being. Psychological Assessment, 28(5), 471–482. https://doi.org/10.1037/pas0000209

Krys, K., Haas, B. W., Igou, E. R., Kosiarczyk, A., Kocimska-Bortnowska, A., Kwiatkowska, A., et al. (2023). Introduction to a culturally sensitive measure of well-being: Combining life satisfaction and interdependent happiness across 49 different cultures. Journal of Happiness Studies, 24, 607–627. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-022-00588-1

Martela, F., & Sheldon, K. M. (2019). Clarifying the concept of well-being: Psychological need satisfaction as the common core connecting eudaimonic and subjective well-being. Review of General Psychology, 23(4), 458–474. https://doi.org/10.1177/1089268019880886

Pezirkianidis, C., Galanaki, E., Raftopoulou, G., Moraitou, D., & Stalikas, A. (2023). Adult friendship and wellbeing: A systematic review with practical implications. Frontiers in Psychology, 14, 1059057. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1059057

Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2001). On happiness and human potentials: A review of research on hedonic and eudaimonic well-being. Annual Review of Psychology, 52, 141–166. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.52.1.141

Ryff, C. D. (2014). Psychological well-being revisited: Advances in science and practice. Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, 83(1), 10–28. https://doi.org/10.1159/000353263

Sollis, K., Biddle, N., Maulana, H., Yap, M., & Campbell, P. (2024). Measuring wellbeing across culture and context: Are we getting it right? Social Indicators Research, 174, 123–155. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-024-03382-z

Sutin, A. R., Luchetti, M., Stephan, Y., Sesker, A. A., & Terracciano, A. (2024). Purpose in life and stress: An individual-participant meta-analysis of 16 samples. Journal of Affective Disorders, 345, 378–385. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2023.10.149

Vansteenkiste, M., Ryan, R. M., & Soenens, B. (2020). Basic psychological need theory: Advancements, critical themes, and future directions. Motivation and Emotion, 44, 1–31. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-019-09818-1

Węziak-Białowolska, D., McNeely, E., & VanderWeele, T. J. (2019). Human flourishing in cross cultural settings: Evidence from the United States, China, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, and Mexico. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 1269. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01269

Wilkie, L., Fisher, Z., Geidel, A., Goodall, I., Kamil, S., Davies, E., & Kemp, A. H. (2026). A systematic review and network meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials of well-being-focused interventions. Nature Human Behaviour, 10, 715–726. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-025-02369-1

Pressman, S. D., Kraft, T. L., & Bowlin, S. (2013). Well-being: Physical, psychological, social. In Encyclopedia of Behavioral Medicine.