To be truly happy people must learn to live in radically new ways. Well-being only arises when a person learns how to let go of struggles, to work in the service of others, and to grow in awareness. Prior approaches to feeling good have small or brief benefits because they separate the biological, psychological, social, and spiritual processes of living that must be in harmony for a happy life. The introduction of modern drugs and psychotherapy techniques has not resulted in more people who are very happy with their lives than in the past. Psychologists know much about the psychosocial skills of people who are happy, but know little about their biology or spirituality. Psychiatrists know much about the biomedical characteristics of people who are unhappy, but not those who are happy. No one has integrated the psychosocial and biomedical knowledge that is available about well-being in a coherent developmental perspective.
Fortunately, psychosocial and biomedical approaches to well-being can be fully integrated. The path to well-being provides the foundation needed to transform human personality and cure mental disorders. Researchers of science of well-being aim to describe the principles and mechanisms underlying the path to the good life—that is, a life that is happy, harmonious, virtuous, and wise. “Feeling good” cannot be authentic or stable without “being good” because happiness is the effortless expression of coherent intuitions of the world. Authentic happiness requires a coherent way of living, including the human processes that regulate the sexual, material, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual aspects of experience. Sex, possessions, power, and friendships can be self-defeating or adaptive, depending on how aware people are of their goals and values. The degree of coherence of human thoughts and social relationships can be measured in terms of how well our thoughts and relationships lead to the harmony and happiness of the good life.
The Science of Well-Being quantifies the development of human self-awareness as a sequence of quantum-like steps, which has many implications for everyday life, neuroscience research, and the practice of mental health. This holistic approach has led to a stepwise expansion in the understanding of personality in order to account for observed phenomena, such as self-awareness, free will, creativity, and quantum-like gifts of the mind and spirit that cannot be explained otherwise. What has emerged is an integrated science of well-being that unifies all the traditional divisions of psychology, psychiatry, and neuroscience.
Selected publications on the Science of Well-Being
Cloninger, C. Robert. Feeling Good: The Science of Well Being. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Cloninger, C.R. (2006). The science of well-being: An integrated approach to mental health and its disorders. World Psychiatry, 5, 71-76.
Cloninger, C. R. (2008). On well-being: Current research trends and future directions. Mens Sana Monographs, 6 (1), 3-9.
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Science of Well-Being
