What is Life Satisfaction and why is knowing it important?

Are you happy now?

In the late 1980’s, early 90’s a band of psychologists became interested in what made life worth living, or more specifically what made people happy or happier. This was a shift from the dominant focus on what caused poor mental health or mental illness. If you’re a psychologist, the patients you saw were generally in distress or emotional turmoil. Much of the focus was on the pathology of what was going wrong and how to fix it.

Ed Diener from the US and others became interested in the other side of the equation, the notion of happiness and what contributed to it. In 1984, to aid their studies Diener and colleagues developed a survey tool that was simple enough to be used cross cultures, ages and genders that could measure overall satisfaction with life without trying to uncover why.

The five question Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS) was developed and published in journals. Even today with over 40 years experience in the field, the SWLS remains a respected tool for measuring subjective global life satisfaction, enabling cross-population measures and change over time.

When we developed the Wellteam Scorecard tool we embedded the SWLS into it, ensuring we had a validated tool to enable us to measure impact and provide science-backed feedback to individuals that they could track over time.

The Wellteam Scorecard tool is broken down into an overall score, mind, body, movement, purpose, relationships and fuel (nutrition) components and the Life Satisfaction score.

We are currently seeking funding to analyse correlations between life satisfaction and the various key focus areas of wellbeing. Initial analysis suggests SWLS results have the strongest correlation with overall score and both mind and purpose themes, indicating what we suspected… it’s complicated.

What happens if my Life Satisfaction Score is low?

It happens. From time to time our experience of life will be negatively impacted by events that happen to, by and around us. It doesn’t imply that there’s something wrong with us or that we are helpless in that situation. There can be many factors that contribute to a low life satisfaction score. At Wellteam, we don’t judge, diagnose, treat or pretend to know what you’re going through because life is complicated. If you have a low score, it might be time to reach out to seek help or counsel from people close to you or from a relevant professional.

For some, financial stress can weight heavy on wellbeing. For that reason, if you score at the lowest end of the scale, and your financial situation prevents you from joining us, we offer a Wellteam 12 month “Sponsorship” to help you back on your feet. It’s the least we can do to help.

What happens if my Life Satisfaction Score is low but my overall optimisation score is OK?

This happens occasionally.

Wellteam’s overall score is based upon your response to questions that relate to actions you’re taking on different themes relating to overall wellbeing. The overall score doesn't have any negative responses, it's a snapshot at how you're going against 100% optimal responses.

A score of 0 - 30% is classified as 'ordinary', meaning that you're not taking advantage of all the opportunities to improve your overall wellbeing. It's actually a good result as there's lots you can do.

You may find yourself doing a range of positive things to help to improve wellbeing but are still in a tough situation. Sometimes, time is what we need and waiting might be all we can do.

The power of positive psychology on Life Satisfaction.

Psychologists Ed Diener, Martin Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi are often cited as pioneers of the positive psychology movement in the 1990’s. Their work in exploring contributors to greater happiness guide Wellteam’s philosophy around solution-based wellbeing.

When we think about our life, we have only three elements we are in control of: Anatomy (this is our physical body we are in), our physiology (how are body works) and our psychology (how we experience life).

How we think about things will be the single biggest contributor to our happiness over the course of our life. We can turn a bad situation into a positive outcome or a positive situation into a bad outcome.

The challenge today is our thoughts are pulled from pillar to post with many distractions. We are often over-whelmed. So much information to decipher, so little downtime to stop and clear our minds. Often, the key to greater life satisfaction is simply to reduce the noise, focusing more intently on the most meaningful things. Perhaps that’s why we see the strongest correlation with actions impacting the mind and purpose.

What are you doing today that distracts you from living your best life?

That’s where the Scorecard tool comes in handy, providing a simple way to explore positive things you can do to regain control of your mind and body.

If you haven’t done so, invest five minutes now in updating your score, check your report and look for some quick wins to focus on.

Click here to join us in the Wellteam Global Challenge. It's game on for mind and body.