Subjective Wellbeing – What it is and how to boost it

Subjective Wellbeing

Subjective wellbeing is a concept closely related to happiness, but a bit broader.

The subjective part simply means that this concept relates to someone’s own views, interpretations and assessment of their experiences. Everyone is different, and how we each assess our own levels of life outcomes are what really matter. The wellbeing piece relates to the overall quality of our lives, encompassing many factors. Thus subjective wellbeing is effectively an assessment of how I feel my overall life experience to be.

There are lots of definitions though, so it’s worth sharing a few:

• Diener (1984): “A broad category of phenomena that includes people’s emotional responses, domain satisfactions, and global judgments of life satisfaction.” Diener’s definition considers both affective (emotions) and cognitive (evaluations of satisfaction) components.

• Andrews and Withey (1976): “Global assessments of a person’s life quality as seen through the person’s own eyes.” This definition draws out the subjective aspect of subjective wellbeing.

• OECD Guidelines on Measuring Subjective Well-being (2013): “Good mental states, including all of the various evaluations, positive and negative, that people make of their lives, and the affective reactions of people to their experiences.”

• US Committee of National Statistics Panel on Measuring Subjective Wellbeing: “Subjective well-being (SWB) refers to how people experience and evaluate their lives and specific domains and activities in their lives.” This is probably the one we like the best.

Measuring Subjective Wellbeing

There are many different tools used to measure subjective wellbeing. They range from simple questionnaires to more comprehensive surveys.

Examples of these tools include: Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS), Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS), World Health Organization Five Well-Being Index (WHO-5) and Sonja Lyubomirsky and Heidi Lepper’s Subjective Happiness Scale (SHS).

All of these tools look to cover the subjective aspect of the assessment, but they can vary a bit in the underlying contributing components that they focus on. For example, some will focus more on emotional aspects of someone’s experience while others are more focused on the subject’s cognitive judgements about their lives. 

Can we Improve Subjective Wellbeing?

So, the big question is, can we improve our subjective wellbeing? Or is our assessment of our own lives just the product of our genetics?

The good news is that it appears that we can change our subjective wellbeing. It seems that about 50% of our subjective assessments of our lives are the result of genetic set-points and that about 10% are the result of life events. This leaves a full 40% of our subjective wellbeing as the product of intentional actions that we can take to influence our perception of our experiences in the world.

What can we do to boost our subjective wellbeing?

One of the first things we can do is to try and overcome the errors we often face in terms of trying to figure out what actually makes us happy. By understanding miswanting and hedonic adaptation, we can get a better sense of what levers we can actually pull that will improve our subjectives experiences of life.

One of the trends that seems to come up is that the “having mode” doesn’t really contribute to happiness and wellbeing, but the “being mode” does. By this we mean that if we chase possessions or similar things, we tend to not increase our wellbeing. If instead, though, we focus on adjusting our actions, behaviours and how we spend out time, then we can increase our subjective wellbeing to some extent.

There are quite a few things that you can do that are shown to support increases in subjective wellbeing. They include:

• Investing in social relationships and connections
• Take regular exercise
• Practice some form of mindfulness or meditation
• Set and pursue goals
• Make space to learn and grow as a person
• Practice gratitude
• Develop good sleep routines and practices
• Be kind and help others

We cover many of these topics elsewhere in our website.

And remember, these are behavioural changes that can take some time to have an impact. If things feel difficult in the moment, consider seeking professional support.

Laurie Santos’ excellent free course is a great starting point to learn more. You might also find some interest in exploring the concept of Flow, the PERMA model, the Wheel of Wellbeing and meditation.

Re measuring happiness, you can learn more about some of the approaches here: Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS) (Wikipedia link) and The Subjective Happiness Scale (Berkley Uni link).

It’s worth noting that hedonic adaptation and miswanting affect our abilities to find happiness too. For a bit more inspiration in this space, you might enjoy these happiness quotes.

From the change side of things, you might enjoy this Poem, the Bridges model of change and the WOOPing approach to change, which we have yet to write about.

Our old podcast on happiness might also be of interest:

There’s a big difference between knowing what subjective happiness and what contributes to it and actually making some of the behavioural changes that lead to increased subjective wellbeing. That’s the hardest part of all of this, in our experience at least.

It’s easy to know the right thing to do, but so hard to do it. And like so many domains like this, it can feel easy to jettison the things that help us feel well when we do feel well. Learning not to do this is a challenge.

Overall though, we’re huge believers in the power of adopting positive practices into our lives. It helps personally, and it helps those around you as well as, when you take care of yourself and turn up well, you create better experiences for them and can help them too.

Lots of sources could be helpful including:

Panel on Measuring Subjective Well-Being in a Policy-Relevant Framework; Committee on National Statistics; Division on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education; National Research Council; Stone AA, Mackie C, editors. Subjective Well-Being: Measuring Happiness, Suffering, and Other Dimensions of Experience [Internet]. Washington (DC): National Academies Press (US); 2013 Dec 18. 1, Introduction. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK179225/

Lyubomirsky, S. (2007). The how of happiness: A scientific approach to getting the life you want. Penguin Press.

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