What is “Well-Being?” Eudaimonia & Psychotherapy
We previously discussed how there are many definitions and ways to look at mental health. In the previous post, I didn’t want to dive too deep into formal definitions, but I’m going to do a little of that here. The World Health Organization defines mental health as "a state of well-being in which an individual realizes his or her own abilities, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and is able to make a contribution to his or her community." It’s a perfectly reasonable definition on the surface, but it is one of those definitions that almost begs more questions. How do we define the ability to “cope with the normal stresses of life”? Why are we measuring mental health by productivity and social contribution? And what exactly is a “state of well-being?”
The American Psychiatric Association offers a similar definition. The APA definition, is "a state of mind characterized by emotional well-being, good behavioral adjustment, relative freedom from anxiety and disabling symptoms, and a capacity to establish constructive relationships and cope with the ordinary demands and stresses of life." This also makes intuitive sense, but we still have to define the statements in the definition. And we still have to define “emotional well-being.”
That’s a lot of definition to read through, but I wanted to include them to show how hard this can be to define. I’m focusing specifically on the WHO and APA definitions today because they both emphasize “well-being,” a turn of phrase absent from our previous definitions. “Well-being” piques my interest because it, too, is actually somewhat hard to define. What exactly is “well-being”? That question is not a new one. It goes back at least to Aristotle, who called it eudaimonia (eu — good, daimon — spirit). Eudaimonia was considered the highest good a human being could achieve. But even the ancient Greeks argued about what that actually meant.
So, is “well-being” just about being healthy and feeling good? The Greeks had a word for this approach: hedonia, the root word from which we get “hedonism.” This is pleasure and the absence of pain. Eudaimonia was intended to mean something more. “Well-being” wasn’t just about feeling good, it included meaning, growth, and living in accordance with your deepest values. The tension between these two is still present in modern psychology; Ryan and Deci identified it as one of the central questions in well-being research, and it remains unresolved.
Aristotle developed his definition of eudaimonia in the Nicomachean Ethics. Eudaimonia is not a feeling but an activity. It is not something that happens to you; it is something you do. It comes from living in accordance with your virtues, defined as your deepest capacities and values. It requires engagement with the world, with relationships, with work that matters to you. It is closer to meaning than to happiness. You can be living well, in Aristotle's sense, while also experiencing difficulty, loss, or pain.
Most people come to therapy seeking something closer to hedonia. They want to feel less anxious, less stuck, less like something is wrong. That's a legitimate place to start, and therapy can help with it. But what often emerges over time is something more like the Aristotelian question: what kind of life do I actually want to be living? What matters to me? What am I avoiding, and what does that avoidance cost me?
This is where therapy becomes something closer to applied philosophy. Not in a literal way, there is no homework and no one is reading the Nicomachean Ethics between sessions. But it does ask you to examine your values, your assumptions about yourself and the world, and whether the life you are living is oriented toward what you actually care about. That isn’t really a clinical, psychiatric, or psychological question. It is a philosophical one. Therapy just happens to be one of the places where people are forced to take it seriously.
Moving away from the ancient Greeks and philosophy, we can look at one of the more influential modern frameworks for well-being. Seligman's PERMA model identifies five elements of well-being: positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment. Positive emotion is hedonia. The rest is closer to eudaimonia. The model suggests that a life oriented only toward feeling good is missing most of what makes life good.
Well-being, then, is not a state to be achieved and maintained. It is closer to an ongoing orientation, a direction of travel. The goal of therapy is not to get you to some fixed point of wellness. It is to help you find your own answer to the question the Greeks were asking, and to help you live closer to it.