The term ‘well-being’ includes many aspects such as, happiness, energy, leisure, peace with oneself, contentment and sensitivity to environment. Well-being involves not only happiness and pleasure but also experiencing/feeling satisfaction in life, presence of positive feeling or affect (e g. interest, love, surprise, pleasure) and the absence of negative feelings (e.g. anxiety, depression, stress). A very rich person may be unhappy and a poor person may be happy. Well-being is a matter of how one experiences and interprets one’s life conditions. Money, property, power and prestige provide us with a limited sense of well-being. It has been found that material prosperity is positively related to life satisfaction to some extent. But indefinite increase in material prosperity does not lead to significant life satisfaction. You may attempt Activity 1 to understand the meaning of well-being.

The significance of leading a balanced lifestyle to achieve happiness and well being are:

(i) Material resources: Money, clothing and housing, provide us with the possibility to satisfy our basic needs. Different needs and their nature were discussed in an earlier lesson. We must satisfy both our primary and secondary needs to be happy.

(ii) Cognitive competence: The ability to search and find what we need is also important. Thus we must be knowledgeable, intelligent, and open to learning.

(iii) Subjective competence: When we believe in our problem solving capacity we have faith in ourselves and our abilities to achieve our goals.