How to flourish –– even when you aren’t at your happiest, according to research

By Madeline Holcombe, CNN

(CNN) — There is happiness, and then there is flourishing. And as new research has found, having one doesn’t always mean having the other, too.

Flourishing indicates you’re living a good life, and it is more than individual happiness — it is evaluated from multiple dimensions, including health, financial security, meaning and relationships, according to the new report.

Indonesia topped the rankings of countries where people flourish the most, followed by Mexico and the Philippines, according to the Global Flourishing Study, which published Wednesday.

Many of the places that scored highest in terms of flourishing did not rank highly in assessments of the world’s happiest countries, according to the new report that Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion and Harvard University’s Human Flourishing Program developed in partnership with Gallup and the Center for Open Science. The study includes 22 countries and Hong Kong, a special administrative region of China.

The research was designed to capture a look at much of the world, said study lead and report contributor Dr. Byron Johnson, distinguished professor of the social sciences at Baylor in Waco, Texas.

“The uniqueness of the Global Flourishing Study is the size: We are following 207,000 participants around the world in over 40 different languages on the six inhabited continents,” Johnson said. “This gives a voice to approximately 64% of the world’s population.”

Although it has some limitations, the study is an ambitious and welcome asset when looking at global well-being, said Dr. Felix Cheung, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and Canada Research Chair in Population Well-Being. Cheung is a coauthor of a chapter in the recent World Happiness Report, which was not a part of the Global Flourishing Study.

Wednesday’s report is just the start, said researchers, who will follow up with the people surveyed every year for five years to see how levels of flourishing change and to investigate further the factors that make for a good life.

Younger people face challenges

One result that stands out in this new research and other reports on well-being is that young people tend not to be doing well in comparison with other age groups.

“Perhaps one of the more troubling features of this data is that we find when we aggregate across the 22 countries, flourishing tends to increase with age, so that the youngest individuals are reporting the lowest levels of flourishing,” said Dr. Tyler VanderWeele, study lead and contributor to the report.

That isn’t the case everywhere –– in Poland and Tanzania, for example, flourishing tends to be higher for younger people. But for much of the world, patterns of flourishing over a lifetime seem to be changing, said VanderWeele, the John L. Loeb and Frances Lehman Loeb Professor of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

“Young people are telling us something is wrong,” Cheung said.

There are some theories about why youths are struggling. One study speculated that developed countries tend to have more competitive environments in education systems to get better jobs, which can lead to more stress for young people, he said.

One of Cheung’s previous studies found that Americans don’t see a lot of opportunity for social mobility, meaning people feel their hard work doesn’t necessarily pay off.

“It’s possible that this perception of lack of social mobility particularly hurts younger folks because they’re just trying to transition from either university or from school into their career,” Cheung said.

Surprises in the data

Flourishing was assessed using two questions for each of six domains: happiness, health, meaning, character, relationships and financial security.

While people in richer, developed countries reported feeling more financially secure and better about how their life was going, these developed countries didn’t tend to rank as highly in other categories such as meaning, relationships or prosocial character, which is behavior that promotes kindness and social cohesion.

“This raises important questions with regard to how can we carry out economic development without compromising meaning and purpose and relationships and character,” VanderWeele said.

Some countries reporting the highest levels of flourishing were unexpected, he said.

Indonesia had the highest level of flourishing, with the Philippines ranked third and Nigeria fifth –– all countries that were not in the top 20 of the World Happiness Report.

On the other hand, Sweden was fourth on the list of happiest countries but placed in the middle in the report on flourishing. The United States also ranked toward the middle of countries in the flourishing report.

“Why might this be so? Well, this is some of what we have to do in the years ahead to try to understand and unpack these results,” VanderWeele said.

Parts of flourishing are in your control

While further studies will continue to investigate the factors that most affect flourishing, there are ways in which people can start to evaluate their lives from this research.

“One approach to reflecting on one’s own flourishing is simply to go through our 12 core flourishing questions,” VanderWeele said. “One respondent said that she had been thinking about committing to a volunteering activity for some months, and after going through and realizing she was missing a deeper sense of purpose, she decided to make a commitment to this volunteering activity.”

You can find the 12 core flourishing questions here.

The data also shows that there are ways to find well-being under multiple circumstances –– not just in developed countries with a high gross domestic product, Cheung said.

A consistent takeaway from the study and from other research into well-being is that human connection is crucial for a good life, he added.

People who participate in religious or civic life tend to report higher well-being as well as those who live with others or regularly share meals, Cheung said.

There are aspects of flourishing that are under a person’s control, but some are not, he added. Conflict, natural disasters and economic hardship may take a toll on people’s well-being, and that is natural, Cheung said.

“When one person is unhappy, that’s an individual issue,” he said. “But when the population isn’t happy, that’s a structural problem, and a structural problem requires structural solutions.”

If you’d like to reflect on the questions to assess flourishing, they include the following. (Check the link to assess the flourishing measures on a scale of 0 to 10):

• Overall, how satisfied are you with life as a whole these days?
• In general, how happy or unhappy do you usually feel?
• In general, how would you rate your physical health?
• How would you rate your overall mental health?
• Overall, to what extent do you feel the things you do in your life are worthwhile?
• I understand my purpose in life.
• I always act to promote good in all circumstances, even in difficult and challenging situations.
• I am always able to give up some happiness now for greater happiness later.
• I am content with my friendships and relationships.
• My relationships are as satisfying as I would want them to be.
• How often do you worry about being able to meet normal monthly living expenses?
• How often do you worry about safety, food, or housing?

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