An Introduction To Emotional Well-Being

Some people just thrive in life, finding the majority of their personal experiences to be beneficial and fulfilling. They are basically happy, successful, and satisfied with life. The rest of us want to know how they do it. Throughout the ages, philosophers, spiritual leaders and motivational gurus have tried to figure this out and teach us. Some of their answers seem like common sense. Others require faith in certain beliefs, and some seem so mystical that most of us don't understand them. We can abandon mystical approaches that require knowledge that only a few can get, and commit to the self-directed effort required to challenge limiting beliefs and adopt the beneficial practices that science is validating.

In the past few decades science has started to subject thriving in life, under the banner of emotional well-being, to the metaphorical “microscope”. The results to date have revealed profound relationships between positive emotional states, beneficial mental and behavioral lifestyle practices and psychosomatic health. This careful observation and experimentation is placing emotional well-being squarely in the middle of thriving in life. In addition to promoting mental health, thriving emotions are critical nutrients of physical health and important components of a rewarding life.

Basic Intrinsic Needs

The model adopted and expanded in this paper is based largely in the premise that wellness, happiness and satisfaction with life are developed and maintained largely through experiences that meet three important extrinsic needs and produce three important thriving emotional states. Intrinsic needs arise within individuals, while extrinsic needs are developed in response to rewards provided by a person’s culture.

Meeting needs for safety, belonging and purposed control of our lives have repeatedly been found to drive emotional well-being. The sense of safety is derived largely from secure attachment to attuned caregivers, emotional self-regulation and management of exposure to threats. The sense of belonging results from connecting with, being attached to, and contributing to the well-being of others. Self-determinism is the term adopted in this model for exercising control over one’s self and one’s life. This control results in the growth of personal resources to maximize opportunities and create purpose and meaning in life.

Basic intrinsic needs have been found to be the most commonly endorsed and universal psychological needs expressed across many cultures. Edward Deci and Richard Ryan at The University of Rochester conducted a series of studies on the contribution of many proposed needs to both highly satisfying and highly dissatisfying personal experiences. The types of intrinsic needs described above were consistently chosen by subjects as the main contributors to their satisfaction with their experiences. The needs for temporary pleasure and popularity were judged retrospectively as having low impact, and the need for financial prosperity as having marginal impact on satisfaction and dissatisfaction with specific life experiences.

Self-esteem was chosen as the most important safety need met among citizens of the United States. While self-esteem is clearly an outcome of successful personal experiences, it is not clearly a growth motive for them. Abraham Maslow proposed that the need for self-esteem operates mainly as a response to perceived deficiency or the threat of being devalued by others. As such, the need for self-esteem is an outgrowth of the need for psychological safety that is derived from being valued by others. This conclusion has been supported by the work of a number of personality theorists and researchers, particularly those who have studied self-esteem striving.

Striving for self-esteem is most active when people are promoting and defending themselves. Self-promotion is highly related to self defense. It is the effort to influence how we are perceived by others. Self-promotion undermines authenticity, an essential ingredient in thriving. Being overly concerned about how we are viewed by others activates our self defenses. On the other hand, humility is the practice of surrendering such concerns, freeing us from the needs to promote and defend ourselves. Ironically, humble individuals are very attractive to people who are thriving in life because of their authenticity and ability to focus in an attuned way on others.

People who are thriving tend to report high self-esteem, but do not focus much on promoting and defending themselves. Hence their needs for self-esteem are not major motivating factors in their lives. Rather, they are being self-actualized through meeting their needs for belonging and purposed control of their lives. Self-esteem follows. Rather than promoting themselves to cover for their perceived weaknesses, they are more likely to experience self-compassion about their weaknesses.

The need for safety is primary to the other two needs since the emotional insecurity that results from chronic perceptions of threat undermines a person’s sense of belonging and control of his life. As the need for safety is met, the needs for belonging and control begin to drive social-emotional growth and personal accomplishments. Growth in human relatedness contributes to well-being through the development of such character related dispositions as gratitude, compassion and forgiveness. These personal spiritual qualities promote and sustain other-centered purposes that create great meaning, happiness and satisfaction with life and offset self-serving disappointments. Also, growth in such competencies as knowledge, skills and resiliency has been shown to be one of the most important sources of success and satisfaction with life.

Thriving Emotional States

Emotional well-being, experienced as thriving emotional states, serves as a barometer to the degree in which the three basic psychological needs described above are being met. This paper examines the roles of three important sustainable thriving emotional states that are important components of emotional well-being: emotional security, loving kindness and satisfaction with life. Emotional security derives primarily from meeting the need for safety. Loving kindness is cultivated through fulfilling the need for belonging, and satisfaction in life from meeting the need for control of life and investing one’s resources in beneficial values. There are other names for these states that might serve equally well, but these names are easy to remember and think about so they are used in this model.

While emotional well-being results largely from the interaction of these three components, each component makes a significant unique contribution to thriving in life. Each operates biologically and psychologically on somewhat different psychosomatic systems. Safety operates biologically primarily through the autonomic nervous system and related endocrine processes. Belonging operates most directly through the actions of oxytocin and opioids. Satisfaction operates primarily through the actions of dopamine.

Each of the three emotional states is mainly accessed and sustained by somewhat different practices. Emotional security is sustained mainly by managing stress and distress, particularly through the maintenance of a viable social support system. Satisfaction with life is sustained through cheerful and optimistic engagement in life practices that contribute to our sense of purpose and meaning in life. This includes personal accomplishment, personal growth, and contributions to others and society.

Loving kindness serves as the primary destination on the path to feelings of belonging and to social-emotional and spiritual maturity. It is sustained in large part through the practices of gratitude, compassion and forgiveness. Gratitude is feeling and expressing pleasure derived from constructive engagement with people and opportunities. Compassion is feeling acceptance of and contentment with oneself and situations, and emotional attunement to others that enable us to care about them and for them. Forgiveness is surrendering blame of oneself, other persons and situations associated with distressing experiences, and taking responsibility for the resolution of one’s own distress.

Thriving Habits and Personal Resources

Emotional Security, loving-kindness and satisfaction with life are based largely on the creation and maintenance of thriving lifestyle habits that most individuals can adopt. These beneficial practices are stable mental and physical actions which reliably occur during routines or in response to specific types of situations. They create beneficial experiences that build personal resources for interacting constructively with others, developing and achieving personal goals, and sustaining personal growth throughout life. Thriving practices may require considerable intentional focus and effort to fully develop and implement, but only marginal intention to maintain as healthy lifestyle habits
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Thriving in life operates through positive adaptive cycles, based in the reciprocal interaction between healthy beneficial experiences and the growth of personal psychological resources for adapting constructively to the people and opportunities in one’s life. Thriving experiences build personal resources, which then promote more thriving experiences. An example of a personal resource is the regulation of one’s own emotions. Thriving experiences foster emotional self-regulation, and self-regulation promotes thriving experiences. Each presents a gateway to changing and supporting the other, and consequently to constructive adaptive changes in our lives. This cycle of positive personal changes can take place automatically throughout most of our lives, but becomes an even more powerful tool when it is engaged consciously and intentionally.

Another area of personal resources is beneficial beliefs. The creation and use of beneficial beliefs is one of the most important lifestyle practices. One important area of beliefs is beliefs about other people. Viewing others from a grateful and compassionate disposition promotes understanding and feelings of attachment and belonging with them. Such beliefs are resources that prompt us to act in loving kind ways toward others.
Beliefs that we can control ourselves and control our lives are most often referred to by social scientists as self-efficacy, and by others as self-confidence. Self-efficacy is a personal resource that helps us adopt and realize challenging and rewarding goals. Our personal experiences are greatly influenced by our beliefs of self-efficacy, and they also reinforce these beliefs.

Personal resources such as emotional self-regulation, compassionate beliefs about others and self-efficacy create stability and continuity in our lives. They also provide tools for adaptation to changing circumstances and demands. Thriving people experience stability and continuity in life in the midst of continual adaptation supported by growth in personal resources.

Sustained Intentions and Thriving Habits

Thriving lifestyle practices are controlled in large part by our minds as we build and exercise intention strength, self-control strength and habit strength. At any point in time this control will vary along a continuum from mainly automatic to largely intentional. In this paper, the intentional implementation of thriving lifestyle practices is referred to as self-determinism.

Intention strength is the personal power to start constructive change and action plans and to maintain them to goal completion. Research shows that the strength of intentions to take constructive action is based largely in levels of motivation, focus and self-efficacy. Motivation for a specific goal is provided by “active” beliefs in the value of the anticipated outcomes. The activity and influence of beliefs are based in the degree to which we are consciously aware of and act on them at crucial times. It is possible for higher values to become fairly inactive in our lives for a time if we lose track of them and fail to act on them. To sustain motivation for beneficial practices we need to maintain conscious active beliefs in their value.

Focus is self-directed attention and effort, practiced largely through the principles of action planning. Action planning principles include routines, list-making, keeping a calendar, priority-setting, note taking, regular assessments of progress and making needed adjustments. Sustained focus on those outcomes that require high levels of self-control, such as developing new habits of character and self-care, require high levels of action planning.

Self efficacy drives us to set more challenging goals and respond to setbacks with resilience. There is considerable evidence that self-efficacy to take beneficial action differs in important ways with self-efficacy to exercise self control. Self-efficacy to take beneficial action is more specific to the particular areas of knowledge and skills required for specific types of goals, while self-efficacy to exercise self-control is more general across all activities. The effort to exercise self-control is considerably higher and more mentally depleting than that required to take actions, thus making sustained self-control more challenging.

Since our capacities for intentional mental control are quite limited, it is ideal for mental control of beneficial practices to become automatic through habits. Fortunately, what is controlled intentionally for a period of time becomes habitual. Habits are formed through the association of cues in specific types of situations to particular patterns of actions. For instance, we may intend to drive to a well known location. Reaching that location requires a marginal degree of intention once we embark because the turns are cued by visual markers that allow us to drive on a highly automatic basis. If we intend to drive to a new location that requires us to follow some of a familiar route, we need more intention strength to override part of our habit and take different turns when they are required. The metaphor here is that the intentional creation of any new beneficial habit requires us to take different turns in our lives.

Developing new beneficial self-care practices and coping strategies often requires us to replace self-defeating habits. In this case, intention needs to be accompanied by self-control. Self-defeating habits such as angering easily and self-soothing of stress with food and drugs are most easily broken when the situational cues to which their actions are associated are attached to new beneficial actions. Doing this intentionally is a positive way to build self-control strength.

Since reaching goals for self-control of maladaptive habits requires more psychological energy than many other goals these types of goals are best addressed one at a time through careful intentional action planning. Fortunately, we have one psychological resource for reaching self-control goals that is not as available for other goals. Research shows that the neural pathways for self-control strength operate in a very general way, with the self-control and self-efficacy gained by replacing any one self-defeating habit being available to help replace any other self-defeating habit. Each individual act of self-control strengthens the general neural pathway for further self-control. This process has been compared to building a general self-control “muscle”.

Thriving responses to people and life opportunities are built largely by repeated intentional actions, and can be maintained with moderate conscious awareness and mental effort once they become beneficial habits. When beneficial lifestyle practices begin to weaken due to conflict with other goals, greater infusion of intention is required to maintain or restart them. People who thrive in life carefully invest their capacities for personal resource development and use those resources to form beneficial habits.

If we believe that we are mainly products of the events and circumstances of our lives, we will exercise marginal control of our lives and hold events and circumstances responsible for our well-being. In psychological terms this is called external locus of control. If we believe that our experiences are created both automatically and intentionally by our minds, we can have considerable ability to determine our experiences and exercise control of ourselves, our lives and our well-being through internal locus of control.

Well-being is created by our minds as our minds create our personal experiences. Experiences can exert both positive and negative effects on both our minds and our bodies. Beneficial experiences are nutrients, like the air we breathe. Even painful and distressing experiences can become beneficial if we learn and grow from them. This paper describes many intentional practices which build resources through beneficial experiences, and support thriving in life through meeting the needs for safety, belonging and control of our lives.