Beyond feeling better: what flourishing actually looks like

Photo by Porapak Apichodilok

Most people come to therapy with a clear goal and can often boil down to stopping feeling the way they do; stuck, anxious, of low mood. That's completely understandable but it also sets a fairly low bar for what mental health can actually look like.

Seligman (2011) asked a different question.

Instead of asking how we can reduce our “suffering’ he asked what would our lives look like if we “flourished” instead?

His PERMA model maps five core pillars that contribute to lasting psychological wellbeing.

The elements provide a way for us to understand what might be missing in our lives. When we feel as though we are struggling, one or more of these areas is almost always depleted. And when we’re genuinely thriving, all five of these elements tend to be present in some form.

As you’d expect, PERMA is an acronym and each letter has its own meaning.

The five elements of flourishing

P - Positive Emotion

This pillar looks beyond happiness, including a wide range of positive states: joy, gratitude, serenity, interest, hope, pride, awe, and love. These aren't trivial states. Fredrickson's broaden-and-build theory shows that positive emotions actually expand our thinking. They broaden our attention, help us build social resources and create upward spirals toward greater wellbeing (Fredrickson & Joiner, 2002). And these have more than a momentary effect. These resources, which we build through positive emotional experiences, are durable. They draw us toward greater resilience even when difficulties arise later.

Positive emotion isn't something that either happens to you or doesn't. You can build your capacity for it. Practices such as mindfulness, slowing down to absorb the good moments, gratitude reflection and shifting attentional habits all help build the capacity for positive emotions. So does shifting where your attention naturally goes. This goes beyond the happiness we think of.

In my work with clients, the hypnotherapeutic state is particularly useful here. Deep relaxation itself generates positive feelings and, in that state, we can begin rehearsing new emotional responses, building neural pathways toward experiences that feel more rewarding.

E - Engagement

You know the feeling of being so absorbed in something that you lose track of time? Csikszentmihalyi (1990) called this ‘flow’. Over 40 years of research and it’s become one of the most reliable markers of psychological wellbeing being linked to autonomy, self-esteem, life satisfaction, and resilience.

Flow requires that a specific task stretches your abilities just enough, whether it is at work,  sport, music, creative hobbies or conversation. What matters is that the activity demands enough of you to apply your full attention.

Many people who seek out therapy to help with low mood or anxiety have lost access to flow, either withdrawing from activities they once loved, or never quite identifying what engages them. Rebuilding engagement is often slow, partly because low mood makes everything feel an effort and partly because we sometimes need to reconnect with parts of ourselves that got set aside years ago.

R - Relationships

Humans are not built for isolation. Diener and Seligman (2004) showed that strong, supportive relationships are one of the most consistent predictors of lasting wellbeing - more so than income beyond what you need. And the evidence on what isolation does to us physically is equally stark. Studies showed that loneliness and social isolation carry a mortality risk comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day (Holt-Lunstad et al., 2015).

In the PERMA mode, relationships are not focused on romantic relationships specifically. It means connection: feeling seen, valued and cared for by others, and being able to reciprocate that. These connections can be with friendships, bonds with family or ties within a community.

What often complicates this is that the mental states most damaging to relationships (anxiety, depression, shame…) are often the same ones that make reaching out feel impossible.

Therapy can create a contained space to understand and explore those patterns.

M - Meaning

This is the element that tends to separate people who feel OK from people who feel alive.

Viktor Frankl, author of Mans Search for Meaning (a superb book to read), placed the search for meaning at the very centre of human psychology. A survivor of Nazi concentration camps, his observation was simple: people could endure almost any suffering if they had a reason for it.

Research confirms this. A sense of meaning is linked to greater life satisfaction, higher resilience and lower rates of depression. Those who report mental health challenges tend to report markedly lower levels of felt meaning (Thir & Batthyány, 2016). Having purpose in life is associated with happiness, better health and greater capacity to face adversity.

Meaning doesn't require dramatic purpose. For most people it's found in quieter things such as doing the best for our children, caring for others, being creative, connecting with nature, spiritual practice or contributing to our communities. What matters is that we experience our lives as mattering in some way beyond our own immediate comfort.

A - Accomplishment

When clients have chronic low self-esteem or a long history of negative self-talk, this element usually suffers. They either don't set goals because failure feels too confirming of their worst beliefs about themselves, or they discount achievements so quickly that the positive feeling never lands. Part of the work is helping the nervous system actually hold onto those moments of success — something the hypnotherapeutic state can facilitate by anchoring new experiences at a subconscious level.

Seligman included this element because people pursue achievement even when it doesn't immediately produce happiness. There's something intrinsically motivating about working toward a goal and reaching it. And engaging in an activity that triggers a sense of mastery or progress contributes to our resilience. There seems to be something that matters in having a felt sense of being someone who follows, which is quite separate from the outcome itself. It applies to learning a new skill, maintaining a morning routine, finishing a creative project, getting through a tricky task, and so on. What matters is that, in the moment of completion, we register this – and let ourselves feel our accomplishment.  

When clients have a long history of negative self-talk or lower self-esteem, this element usually suffers. They either don't set goals because failure feels too confirming of their worst beliefs about themselves, or they discount achievements so quickly that the positive feeling never lands. Part of the work we can do together is helping the nervous system actually hold onto those moments of success, something the hypnotherapeutic state can facilitate by anchoring new experiences at a deeper level.

How the five elements work together

What makes PERMA useful isn't any single, standalone element rather, it is the way the five work together. Engagement deepens relationships. When you know your purpose, it sustains you through difficulty. Positive emotion opens your thinking, and that makes accomplishment more likely. Each element builds on the others.

The aim of therapy isn't only to remove the “symptoms” that people come with. It's also about creating a life where wellbeing has solid ground to stand on. PERMA gives us a way to understand what that ground is made of.

We can explore – and perhaps use the hypnotic state - the beliefs and emotional patterns that often block each of these elements. It might be a deep-seated sense of unworthiness that prevents connection, or anxiety that prevents engagement. It could be that the inner critic dismisses every achievement before it can register.

If this resonates

If one or more of these five pillars feels a little depleted, then let’s talk. I work with clients to understand where the gaps are in the conditions for growth. If you'd like to explore what that could look like for you, I'd love to hear from you.

References:

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Harper & Row.

Diener, E., & Seligman, M. E. P. (2004). Beyond money: Toward an economy of well-being. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 5(1), 1–31.

Frankl, V. E. (1946/2006). Man's Search for Meaning. Beacon Press.

Fredrickson, B. L., & Joiner, T. (2002). Positive emotions trigger upward spirals toward emotional well-being. Psychological Science, 13(2), 172–175.

Holt-Lunstad, J., Smith, T. B., Baker, M., Harris, T., & Stephenson, D. (2015). Loneliness and social isolation as risk factors for mortality: A meta-analytic review. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 10(2), 227–237.

Seligman, M. E. P. (2011). Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being. Free Press.

Porges, S. W. (2018). Polyvagal Theory: A primer in Porges, S. W. & Dana, D. (eds.) Clinical applications of the polyvagal theory: The emergence of polyvagal-informed therapies. W. W. Norton & Company, pp.50-69.

Siegel, D. J. (1999). The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are (3rd Edition). New York: The Guilford Press.

Thir, V., & Batthyány, A. (2016). The state of empirical research on logotherapy and existential analysis. In A. Batthyány (Ed.), Logotherapy and Existential Analysis (pp. 53–74). Springer.