Study finds flourishing doesn’t always mean happiness

Flourishing is more than just being happy, and a new global study finds some countries are doing better than others when it comes to overall well-being.

Take it from researchers at Baylor and Harvard universities, who unveiled a study Wednesday that included more than 207,000 people from 22 countries and Hong Kong. The study is published in the journal Nature Mental Health.

Their Global Fluorishing Study looked at six areas of well-being: happiness, health, meaning, character, relationships and financial security, CNN reported.

Indonesia ranked the highest for flourishing, followed by Mexico and the Philippines.

Surprisingly, many countries that usually rank high in the World Happiness Report, like Sweden and the United States, were only in the middle when it came to flourishing, the report showed.

“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,” said study leader Dr. Byron Johnson, professor of social sciences at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. “This gives a voice to approximately 64% of the world’s population.”

Researchers plan to follow participants every year for five years to learn more about what goes into a “good life,” CNN said.

One major finding? Younger folks around the world are struggling more than older adults.

“Perhaps one of the more troubling features of this data is that we find that 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,” study leader Tyler VanderWeele, a professor of epidemiology at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, told CNN.

In most countries, younger adults said they lack a strong sense of purpose. Countries such as Tanzania and Poland saw better scores among younger people.

Experts suspect there may be several reasons for this. In developed countries, youths may face more competitiveness to get better jobs, which can cause stress.

“Young people are telling us something is wrong,” Felix Cheung, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, told CNN. He’s a co-author of a chapter in a separate study called the World Happiness Report.

While richer countries scored higher in financial security on the flourishing scale, they ranked lower in areas like relationships and meaning.

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

Some of the most-flourishing countries, like Indonesia and Nigeria, didn’t even crack the top 20 of the World Happiness Report.

Flourishing was measured by asking 12 questions:

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

“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,” he added.

Although people can work on parts of flourishing, Cheung noted that things like conflict or natural disasters are out of our control.

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

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