When wellbeing means everything, it means nothing

A clearer way to think about emotional wellbeing in 2026

A new year does something strange to the mind. Even if nothing in our lives changes overnight, we start speaking as if it might. We make lists, set intentions, promise ourselves we will feel better.

But there is an “issue" hiding in those hopes: we are not always clear about what better actually means.

You see, the language we use for feeling well can be surprisingly evasive, even in research!

We talk about wellbeing, life satisfaction, purpose, happiness, and mental health as if they are interchangeable. Sometimes they overlap, of course, but they are not the same thing. This is relevant because if we cannot name what we are trying to improve, we cannot measure it properly, study it clearly, or talk about it honestly in everyday life.

One recent paper [1] tries to clear this up by describing emotional wellbeing as a broad, multi-dimensional picture that includes both: how life feels in the moment and how we evaluate life when we step back and reflect.

For example, you might have had a few unpleasant moments recently, but still feel positive overall when you reflect on whether your life has meaning and direction.

When “wellbeing” means everything, it means nothing

If you wrote “improve my wellbeing” at the top of your 2026 new year list, it would look sensible.

It would also be a tad unhelpful.

Because, you could mean: fewer anxious mornings, more enjoyment in ordinary days, a meaningful sense of direction, or simply the relief of not feeling so weighed down.

One word, several different targets.

This is where confusion creeps in!

Park and colleagues point out that studies can sit under the same wellbeing label while focusing on different ingredients, like life satisfaction in one case and meaning or positive emotions in another, and those findings may not neatly overlap.

The result is that wellbeing advice can sound conflicting when it is actually aimed at different outcomes. For intance, while one approach might improve day to day mood, another strengthens your sense of meaning, and both get described as “improving wellbeing.”

For your own intentions this year, specificity means practicality. Before you decide what to improve, it helps to decide exactly what you mean by feeling well.

Bad days do not cancel wellbeing

What I said in the introduction about ‘having unpleasant moments yet still feeling positive overall’, is not a motivational gloss. It is built into the definition Park and colleagues propose.

They are explicit that emotional wellbeing can include negative feelings like sadness, and that high emotional wellbeing does not mean the absence of negative emotions.

The key is to stop treating negative experience as a verdict.

See, emotional wellbeing is closer to a background state than a passing event. A hard moment can sit on top of a life that still feels coherent and worth living. And once you see that, the attitude changes.

So, instead of asking why you still feel bad, it is more useful to notice what your emotions tend to do across days and weeks. Do they calm down after they spike, or do they keep dragging on? Do you bounce back, or do you stay stuck?

That is close to what Park and colleagues highlight as an important direction for research too. They note that we may need to look beyond simple averages and pay attention to how our emotions move over time, including how much they swing and how quickly they calm down again.

How life feels, and how life looks

To make sense of those ups and downs, it helps to separate two things we often blend together: experience and reflection.

The experiential layer is the emotional quality of your everyday life, the mix of pleasant and unpleasant feelings as you go through the day. It is the part of wellbeing you can notice quickly.

The reflective layer is what you conclude when you step back and take stock: how satisfied you feel with life overall, whether life feels meaningful, and whether you feel able to pursue goals that matter to you, including goals that reach beyond your own immediate comfort.

This is also where the word wellbeing starts to become usable again for your 2026 list. It lets you be more precise about what you are trying to improve (experience or reflection), rather than guessing what feeling well means.

Context counts

By now, the difference between experience and reflection should feel fairly clear. But the paper adds a final detail that stops the whole thing becoming too abstract: these features occur in the context of culture, life circumstances, resources, and life course.

In other words, emotional wellbeing is not something we carry around in a sealed jar. It is shaped by the life we are actually living.

This is relevant for two reasons. First, the same emotional pattern can mean something different depending on what is being asked of you right now. For example, feeling blue during a week of poor sleep and relentless deadlines is not the same as feeling blue when life is calm on paper but nothing feels worth doing.

Second, the authors note that we often need wider lenses than the individual, because wellbeing includes family and community contex. In other words, our emotional wellbeing is influenced by whether we feel supported and safe in our relationships, and whether we have a sense of belonging in the places we spend our time.

Conclusion

So, as you write your 2026 list, make “wellbeing” more specific :)

Decide whether you are aiming to improve how your actual days go, or how you evaluate your life when you step back …

… or both!

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Reference

[1] Park, C. L., Kubzansky, L. D., Chafouleas, S. M., Davidson, R. J., Keltner, D., Parsafar, P., Conwell, Y., Martin, M. Y., Hanmer, J., & Wang, K. H. (2023). Emotional Well Being: What It Is and Why It Matters. Affective Science, 4, 10–20.