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5 Ways to Wellbeing

What are the 5 Ways to Wellbeing poster: in a busy park scene the 5 ways to wellbeing are depicted as families and friends come together to socialise and interact with their surroundings to Connect, Be Active, Take Notice, Keep Learning and Give.

The five ways to wellbeing are five simple, evidence-based ways to improve mental capital and mental wellbeing throughout life.

What are the 5 ways to wellbeing?

Developed by the New Economics Foundation, the 5 ways to wellbeing are:

Connect

With the people around you. With family, friends, colleagues and neighbours. At home, work, school or in your local community. Think of these as the cornerstones of your life and invest time in developing them. Building these connections will support and enrich you every day.

Be active

Go for a walk or run. Step outside. Cycle. Play a game. Garden. Dance. Exercising makes you feel good. Most importantly, discover a physical activity you enjoy and that suits your level of mobility and fitness.

Take notice

Be curious. Catch sight of the beautiful. Remark on the unusual. Notice the changing seasons. Savour the moment, whether you are walking to work, eating lunch or talking to friends. Be aware of the world around you and what you are feeling. Reflecting on your experiences will help you appreciate what matters to you.

Keep learning

Try something new. Rediscover an old interest. Sign up for that course. Take on a different responsibility at work. Fix a bike. Learn to play an instrument or how to cook your favourite food. Set a challenge you will enjoy achieving. Learning new things will make you more confident as well as being fun.

Give

Do something nice for a friend, or a stranger. Thank someone. Smile. Volunteer your time. Join a community group. Look out, as well as in. Seeing yourself, and your happiness, linked to the wider community can be incredibly rewarding and creates connections with the people around you.

What Works Wellbeing has a neat post on how the UK compares to other European countries on the 5 ways to wellbeing and how they are affected by age, gender and other factors: 5 ways to wellbeing in the UK .

Curious? Evidence for the 5 ways from the New Economics Foundation (pdf).

Also, in doing this sketch, it’s quite clear that parks are awesome for wellbeing.

Also see:

Published 13 Oct 2019

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Keep exploring

Survivorship Bias illustration: two analysts observe bullet damage, depicted by red dots, on a fighter plane returning from battle. They propose that heavier armour is added to all aircraft in the most hit areas of the plane. A third onlooker wonders whether this surviving plane tells a different story in that it returned because the most vulnerable areas weren't hit. Maybe heavier armour should be added to those areas?

Survivorship bias

Who cut down the last tree illustration: 300 years ago we see someone cutting down a tree with an axe in a large dense forest. 100 years ago we see someone cutting down a tree in a now much more sparse forest. Today, there's only a small sapling left, and someone just snapped a branch off it. So what next?

Who cut down the last tree?

What is Optimism bias example explained: A stunt rider overestimates their chance of leaping a canyon thanks to optimism bias. Various onlookers gasp. "Huh" says the rider

Vorfreude explanation and example: what is vorfreude? the pleasure in anticipation shown by someone looking enjoying looking forward to their upcoming holiday

What is the paradise paradox explained with a person on a city balcony dreaming of a beach where a person is dreaming of the city

The paradise paradox

What is the Peter Principle explanation: a confident and competent junior worker gets promoted to a senior level. At the senior level, they appear very happy and excel such that they get a promotion to Director. As a Director, their competence has been exceeded and we see them in a state of stress and disarray. Oh dear.

The Peter Principle

So the story goes, as told by Stephen Sigler, Nature May 1989: "The US military studied fighter planes returning from missions to try to improve their survival rate and were considering adding heavy armour to those parts of the plane that tended to show the greatest concentration of hits from enemy fire, until statisticians pointed out the fallacy of that argument. The more vulnerable parts of the plane were those with the fewest hits; planes hit there tended not to return at all. The single most vulnerable part, the pilot’s head, was without serious scar in the sample of planes that returned." It’s easy to draw correlations from what we see in front of us. But what we see usually represents just a small part of what has happened. Focusing on the evidence we can easily see at the expense of that we can’t leads to survivorship bias. To say it another way, when Bill Gates drops out of college and starts Microsoft it might seem like dropping out is a path to success for others too, but that ignores all the dropouts who didn’t create Microsofts and consequently you didn’t hear about. Silent evidence — the evidence that we don’t or can’t easily choose to consider — is a term from Nicholas Nassim Talleb. When trying to discover the veracity of the planes story I enjoyed Bill Casselman’s American Mathematical Society article on The Legend of Abraham Wald. The postscript points to some of the source behind the story including a mention of Stephen Sigler’s letter in Nature quoted above. I covered survivorship bias before, but I like this story so much I thought it was worth doing again.…So the story goes, as told by Stephen Sigler, Nature May 1989: "The US military studied fighter planes returning from missions to try to improve their survival rate and were considering adding heavy armour to those parts of the plane that tended to show the greatest concentration of hits from enemy fire, until statisticians pointed out the fallacy of that argument. The more vulnerable parts of the plane were those with the fewest hits; planes hit there tended not to return at all. The single most vulnerable part, the pilot’s head, was without serious scar in the sample of planes that returned." It’s easy to draw correlations from what we see in front of us. But what we see usually represents just a small part of what has happened. Focusing on the evidence we can easily see at the expense of that we can’t leads to survivorship bias. To say it another way, when Bill Gates drops out of college and starts Microsoft it might seem like dropping out is a path to success for others too, but that ignores all the dropouts who didn’t create Microsofts and consequently you didn’t hear about. Silent evidence — the evidence that we don’t or can’t easily choose to consider — is a term from Nicholas Nassim Talleb. When trying to discover the veracity of the planes story I enjoyed Bill Casselman’s American Mathematical Society article on The Legend of Abraham Wald. The postscript points to some of the source behind the story including a mention of Stephen Sigler’s letter in Nature quoted above. I covered survivorship bias before, but I like this story so much I thought it was worth doing again.

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