PERMA for remembering the five components of well-being

P = positive affect ( feeling happy)

E = engagement, flow, absorption in whatever you’re doing

R = relationships, positive ones

M = meaning in your life

A = accomplishment, pursuing success and mastery just because it’s satisfying

(from Flourish by Martin Seligman, p 16)

How to use PERMA?

  1. Add PERMA to your daily checklist of things to do and review. At the end of the day, think about how good the day was in terms of your sense of happiness, engagement, positive social experiences, meaning and accomplishment.
  2. Use PERMA to help you prioritize your activities. We can’t do everything we want to do, but we can choose to do the important things.

How can I measure my well-being to see how well I’m flourishing?

Answer: Click here to take the NEF online well-being survey.

The NEF well-being survey is used to assess the well-being of European countries.  (Denmark wins; the Baltic States do rather badly.)

The questionnaire takes about 10-15 minutes and asks 50 questions on a broad range of topics to assess your well-being.

At the end, you get your overall well-being score and your scores on the individual components.

Here is a list of the well-being components being measured:

From the latest national accounts of well-being report:

Personal well-being is made up of five main components, some of which are broken down further into sub-components. These are:

1.  Emotional well-being. The overall balance between the frequency of experiencing positive and negative emotions, with higher scores showing that positive emotions are felt more often than negative ones. This is comprised of the sub-components:

  • Positive feelings – How often positive emotions are felt.
  • Absence of negative feelings – The frequency with which negative emotions are felt, with higher scores representing less frequent negative emotions.
  • Satisfying life. Having positive evaluation of your life overall, representing the results of four questions about satisfaction and life evaluations.
  • Vitality. Having energy, feeling well-rested and healthy, and being physically active.

2.  Resilience and self-esteem. A measure of individuals’ psychological resources. It comprises the sub-components:

  • Self-esteem – Feeling good about yourself.
  • Optimism – Feeling optimistic about your future.
  • Resilience – Being able to deal with life’s difficulties.

3.  Positive functioning. This can be summed up as ‘doing well’. It includes four sub-components:

  • Autonomy – Feeling free to do what you want and having the time to do it.
  • Competence – Feeling accomplishment from what you do and being able to make use of your abilities.
  • Engagement – Feeling absorbed in what you are doing and that you have opportunities to learn.
  • Meaning and purpose – Feeling that what you do in life is valuable, worthwhile and valued by others.

4.  Social well-being is made up of two main components:

  • Supportive relationships. The extent and quality of interactions in close relationships with family, friends and others who provide support.
  • Trust and belonging. Trusting other people, being treated fairly and respectfully by them, and feeling a sense of belonging with and support from people where you live.

5.  In addition to these indicators, as an example of a well-being indicator within a specific life domain, a satellite indicator of well-being at work has also been created. This measures :

  • job satisfaction
  • satisfaction with work-life balance
  • the emotional experience of work
  • assessment of work conditions

How to use the well-being survey results?

  1. Look at the areas you score poorly in and think about how you could improve things.
  2. Take the test every month or so as a check-up on your “flourishing” health.

Great videos by inspiring thinkers

1. Why is Psychology good? by Martin Seligman, the founder of Positive Psychology

In this TED talk, Martin Seligman talks about psychology — as a field of study and as it works one-on-one with each patient and each practitioner. As it moves beyond a focus on disease, what can modern psychology help us to become?

2. This is another good video by Martin Seligman:

3. And this panel discussion with Martin Seligman, Ross Gittens and Ellen Langer:

clever expressions

  1. “Going along to get along”: non-assertively saying “yes” when you’d  rather say “no” to someone’s request to avoid disappointing them. (Dr. Bill Knaus)
  2. “Disagreeing without being disagreeable”: Disagreeing with someone without causing offense.

Simple, fun party tricks

1.  Top 10 quirky science tricks for parties by Richard Wiseman from Quirkology (3min 22 secs)

2. Cork in the Bottle Trick – Sick Science! (3min 22 secs)

This is a clever trick to play when out with friends at a restaurant. You push the cork into an empty wine bottle and announce that you can get the cork out. You slip away to do your trick, sneakily taking with you a cloth napkin. A few seconds later, you return with the cork out of the bottle. You then ask your friends to have a go!

3. The Tablecloth Trick – Sick Science! (1 min 2 secs)

4. Skewer Through Balloon – Cool Science Experiment (3 min)

5. Soda Can Shake-Up – Cool Science Experiment (2 min 40sec)

Healthy self-talk

  1. When preparing to take on a risky challenge say:

    “I would like to do well, but too bad if I don’t.”

    (Albert Ellis, 2004)


How can I control my emotions rather than have them control me?

Answer: Watch this old-time cartoon video for some pointers!

Controlling Your Emotions Before They Control You

How can I learn to be intelligently slow?

Answer: Read this lovely anecdote by Martin Seligman from his book Flourish:

There is more to intelligence and high achievement than sheer speed. What speed does is give you extra time to carry out the non-automatic parts of the task. The second component of intelligence and achievement is slowness and what you do with all that extra time that being fast affords you.

Mental speed comes at a cost. I found myself missing nuances and taking shortcuts when I should have taken the mental equivalent of a deep breath. I found myself skimming and scanning when I should have been reading every word. I found myself listening poorly to others. I would figure out where they were headed after their first few words and then interrupt. And I was anxious a lot of the time–speed and anxiety go together.

I 1974 we hired Ed Pugh, a perception psychologist who worked on exacting questions such as how many photons of light are needed to fire off a single visual receptor. Ed was slow. He wasn’t physically slow ( he had been the quarterback of his Louisiana high school team), and it wasn’t just the drawl, it was his rate of speech and his reaction time to a question. We called Ed “thoughtful.”

I found myself at a party with Ed, and during a long pause . . .I asked Ed, “How did you become so slow?”
“I wasn’t always slow, Marty. I used to be fast; almost as fast as you are. I learned to become slow. Before my PhD, I was a Jesuit. my socius [the mentor who socializes the Jesuit student, in contrast to the other mentor who grades the student] told me I was too fast. So every day he would give me one sentence to read, and then he made me sit under a tree for the afternoon and think about that sentence.”

“Can you teach me to be slow, Ed?”

Indeed he could.

We read Soren Kierkegaards’s Fear and Trembling together, but at the rate of one page a week, and to top it off, my sister, Beth, taught me transcendental meditation. I practiced TM faithfully forty minutes a day for twenty years.  I cultivated slowness, and I am now even slower than Ed was then. (p 110-112).

Are my drinking habits harming me?

Answer:  Take this 20-item screening test to find out.

Alcohol Abuse Screening Quiz

This quiz was developed by the Office of Health Care Programs, Johns Hopkins University Hospital.

How can I tell if I’m a narcissist?

Answer: Take the online Narcissistic Personality Inventory test.


The NPI is a reliable, well validated test used in a lot of psychological research into narcissism.

It consists of 40 forced-choice questions and takes just a few minutes to complete. You receive a total score and 6 sub-scores for:

  • authority
  • self-sufficiency
  • superiority
  • exhibitionism
  • vanity
  • entitlement

I scored a bit below average overall, but was a tad high for authority and exhibitionism!

Apparently narcissism peaks around 24 and then declines–presumably we mature and grow a bit more wise and humble with age!

Here is a great article on  How to Spot a Narcissist from the Psychology Today website.