And it’s fair to say my response was out of proportion to the crime. They had disrupted my grand plan of a quick duck in.

After a few laps of the shop, I found the tofu’s new resting place, grabbed it, and carried the tension and frustration with me to the checkout and an additional five minutes after I left. There was no sign on the empty shelf, or anything to tell me where it had gone.

It got me thinking… About how often workplaces change something (usually with good intentions), and yet the change can fall short or leave a trail of emotional muck behind it.

So, before you change something at work (the stuff big or the small) it’s worth understanding a bit of the psychology of how we respond to change. Not just so your people survive the change, but so they have a shot at doing well through it.

Here are four things I see most often in our work:

1. “That doesn’t seem fair to me”

Ever been in a traffic jam where two lanes become one, and someone flies up the outside and pushes in?.. Got you fired up?

We want our world to be fair, and we’re very quick to notice when it isn’t.

The thing about that merging driver is that they’re arguably doing the efficient thing. Late merging actually keeps traffic moving, but we’re furious with them anyway. Because it’s not the outcome we’re reacting to, it’s the sense that they didn’t play by the same rules as the rest of us.

Work is the same. We’re more likely to accept an outcome we don’t like if we believe the process behind it was fair. This is known as procedural justice, and it’s one of the better-evidenced ideas in organisational psychology. (Colquitt, et al, 2001)

How a decision was made predicts whether people stay committed to the organisation, even when they didn’t get what they wanted from it.

The mistake I see is leaders treating the reasoning as background detail and the decision as the announcement.

Here are a few practical things you can do to support this:

• Share the criteria for the decision before you apply them, not afterwards as justification.

• When you announce, spend more airtime on how you got there than on where you landed.

• Apply those criteria the same way for everyone. If your team perceives someone was treated better, it will undermine the whole change.

2. “What aren’t they telling us?”

Imagine your manager sends a calendar invite at 9am for a meeting at 3pm. There’s no subject line, or agenda, plus they’ve booked a meeting room, which they never do. Where does your head go?... Impending doom?

Our brains don’t cope well with uncertainty (de Berker et al., 2016), and sometimes the waiting can do more damage than the change itself. When there’s a gap in what we know, we fill it with a story, and thanks to our negativity bias, that story is almost always worse than the reality.

Here’s three things you can do:

• Name the things you don’t know, so people aren’t left guessing whether you’re hiding something.

• Ask regularly what questions people have. If one person is asking, others are wondering.

• Commit to a next-update date and hold it, even when the update is that there’s no news.

3. “Don’t tell me what to do”

Ever rented a house and been kicked out because the landlord wanted it back? It sucks. (I’ve had it happen twice in a row). Now compare that to choosing to move house. It’s the same boxes, same removalists, but a completely different experience.

Nobody wants change done to them. We want a chance to contribute our view, and have some agency in how it plays out. In self-determination theory, autonomy is one of our basic psychological needs.(Ryan & Deci, 2000).

Now, this isn’t a new idea. The hard part is delivering consultation that’s actually genuine, because people can tell.

Want to avoid this sentiment? You might like to try:

• When you share the idea and your reasoning, ask “what haven’t we factored in that matters here?” (and be genuinely open to what people are saying)

• Close the loop on what you heard, what you changed because of it, what didn’t change and why.

• Better still, flip it. Instead of presenting a plan and inviting comment, pose the problem first. “We need to find 10% in efficiencies without hurting service quality. What would you change?”

Consultation doesn’t mean consensus. But in my experience genuine consultation softens the sting of a change someone didn’t want.

4. “I used to be good at this”

This is where I think a lot of change goes belly up.

Someone who’s been excellent at their job for fifteen years works out that on Monday that a change will mean they’ll be slow and clumsy in front of people who used to come to them for help. What that might look like from the outside is resistance. But what it actually is, is not wanting to be visibly bad at something in public.

Competence is the third of the basic needs in self-determination theory, alongside autonomy and relatedness, and change can threaten it directly. It’s also why the transition is never linear. Someone might be fine with the new way on Tuesday, then something goes wrong on Wednesday and they’re back to how things used to be, because the old way was the one where they were good at.

Here are three practical things you could do to counteract this:

• If you can, train before go-live, not after, even when the timeline makes that painful

• Say out loud that things will be slower for a while and for roughly how long, so people don’t read their own fumbling as personal failure

• Give people someone to ask for help that isn’t their manager.

It’s worth mentioning, most of the leaders we work with are also inside the change. They are expected to hold steady for their team while their own role, reporting line or workload might be being redrawn underneath them.

That’s a genuinely hard position, especially emotionally! It’s not that leaders don’t care. It’s that they’re managing their own uncertainty at the same time.

Now, back to the tofu (sorry for the meat lovers reading this post). The funny thing is, I would have been fine if there’d been a sign. Literally! All it would have taken is one minute to put up a sign!

Most of what’s on this list is a version of that sign.

I don’t think this article can solve all of your change challenges, but it can change how people feel about the experience and how they show up throughout it.

Thanks for reading Wellbeing Explained by Be Well Co. This post is public, so feel free to share it. For our paid members, your practical toolkit is ready to download here, it also lives in the perks section so you can find it there when you’re ready.

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Meet the author

is a wellbeing designer, facilitator and Head of Programs at Be Well Co. If positive psychology were a sport, she'd be the over-enthusiastic teammate handing out oranges at half-time. Tegan led the delivery of The Oranges Toolkit workplace wellbeing program and loves helping people and organisations turn wellbeing science into practical, everyday action. You can check out her content on LinkedIn here.

If you’ve been reading us here for a while, you’ll know what we tend to go on about: what the evidence actually says about wellbeing at work, where measurement falls down, and practical ways you can take a research finding into your own professional practice.

This community has grown steadily over the past year, and every new subscriber has made us think harder about how to keep it worth your time. So today we’re officially launching Wellbeing Explained, by Be Well Co. A digital home where we invite experts to answer the questions others won’t, bust myths, and go deeper into the wellbeing science.

Be Well Co sits in a unique space between wellbeing research and wellbeing practice, and the gap between the two is much wider than it should be. What we kept hearing is that practitioners are constantly trying to sort what’s proven from what’s just popular, usually around everything else they’re responsible for, and usually without time to stay across the latest research and claims.

So we’ve built somewhere to work through that in the open. A growing network of contributors writes and records with us, so you can expect a different voice behind every episode, article and post.

We want the translation of wellbeing research to be as accessible as possible to the people who need it most. So the posts are now free to read in full, and only the practical resources sit in the members section for those wanting to take things further into their own practice. If you've read us before, there’s a lot more available than what we had set up in the past, and we’re excited to be opening it up to you all.

This Substack is now the home of Wellbeing Explained.

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Here’s what to expect.

Articles

Substack is the home of our longer-form work, and where we bring in the people we think are worth reading. Some of them you'll already follow. Some of them publish quietly and deserve a much wider audience than they have. All of them are here because they'll take a hard question seriously rather than reach for the tidy answer.

The aim is to improve the quality of thinking and therefore practice in the wellbeing space, which means we’d rather explore a difficult topic than go with the status quo. We’re not interested in repeating familiar ideas.

For practitioners, researchers, leaders, and anyone whose work involves thinking carefully about wellbeing.

Live sessions

Including A Happy Hour, our monthly Friday afternoon session where and sit down with a beer and talk honestly about what they’ve seen that month in the world of wellbeing. The chat is open to those who join the live, so we can hear what’s going on in your world of wellbeing too. Our next one hangout is on Friday 11 Sept, join us.

Community chats

A community of people who take their wellbeing practice seriously, with discussions, support, and connection in our subscriber chat and comment threads.

The podcast

Formerly Researching Happy. , Be Well Co’s Head of Research and Data Translation, has been running this for years, sitting down with an academic from a different field to unpack their research, the challenges they’re actually facing, and what it means for the rest of us.

Folding it into Wellbeing Explained means more episodes and a run of new guests we’re looking forward to.

The video series, coming soon

Each episode takes a popular belief about wellbeing and puts it through the same process. First a fair hearing: where the idea came from and why it caught on. Then the evidence, the case for it, where it cracks, and what’s left standing, with experts brought in to help work through it. The verdict settles on ‘holds up’ or ‘doesn’t hold up’ wherever the evidence puts it.

Season one puts workplace wellbeing on trial. Eight beliefs many have likely built your practice around, tested properly, one at a time. Each episode comes with a practical toolkit for those who want to take it direct into their practice.

A space for members

Members get access to all contributor pieces, podcast episodes and video series plus the practical toolkits you can use in your own practice. Includes worksheets, checklists, presentation templates and useful one pagers you can use with your team, your clients and yourself.

Better wellbeing practice starts with better conversations. We’re glad you’re here!

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Members, head over to our perks page to access your practical toolkit all in one place. it includes downlodable worksheets you can use with your clients or teams, customisable powerpoints with talking points for interactive facilitation, reports, guides, and more.

Perks

Here are some of our popular reads:

So where did this model come from? A small group of researchers in Melbourne in 2012 who could not agree on anything, including what the word “mental health” actually meant.

was one of them, and we we’re so glad to have her on the podcast this week.

There is a line in her new book ‘Good Work’ that Matt kept coming back to, which is that for a lot of adults the workplace is one of the last standing communities we still belong to. Hold that next to the way we usually talk about work, and the two don’t sit easily together.

“Even when you do fix the work, that doesn’t guarantee that everyone will be well. There’s still more that we need to do.”

Full ep available to watch above.

What we cover in the ep

• How protect, promote and respond came together, and why the arguments between the researchers were the point

• Why removing the harm from work still leaves you a long way short of people being well

• The six C’s of good work: clarity, control, connection, contribution, competence and care

• What is happening on the ground as the psychosocial legislation lands, including why some large organisations are going backwards in order to go forwards

• Why small businesses are furthest from the minimum standard, and the one advantage they have over the big end of town

• What Kat says to the HR and wellbeing people who are exhausted from trying to move their leaders

• Why human happiness might become an organisation’s biggest advantage as more of the work becomes AI led

About Dr Kat Page

is an organisational psychologist and leadership partner at ByMany, and an Adjunct Professor at Swinburne. She co-authored the influential integrated approach to workplace mental health, and she is the author of Good Work: Transform your work from the inside out, which takes decades of wellbeing science and turns it into practical workplace change. You can find her on Instagram and LinkedIn.

More about Wellbeing Explained

Better wellbeing practice starts with better conversations. We bring in the experts to answer questions that others won’t, bust myths, and go deeper into the science. Subscribe to Wellbeing Explained to get every episode as it lands.

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Loved this ep? Give it a like and share with someone who should hear this conversation too.

We’re also over on on Spotify and YouTube - come say Hi!

Well, here’s my vote (and if you know my work, this will likely come as no surprise): Professor Corey Keyes. I think he has the single best consecutive run of research papers in wellbeing science and positive psychology across a 10-year window 1995-2005 (and yes that’s technically 11 years, but… shh).

In this window, Corey produced a cluster of papers that have together gathered something like 50,000 citations, published in esteemed, mainstream outlets like the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and American Psychology. This run was an example of the best that positive psychology could have been, but doesn’t seem to live up to it since.

So let’s see the run:

The structure of psychological wellbeing revisited

Ryff & Keyes (1995) took the six dimensions of psychological wellbeing and put them through rigorous confirmatory factor analysis in a national sample. It showed that eudaimonic wellbeing is multi-dimensional and distinct from the hedonic measures that dominated at the time. It gave the field a proper alternative. Read more.

Social wellbeing

Keyes (1998). This one still feels like gold. Corey argued that a complete picture of mental health has to include how we evaluate our relationship to society and community — social acceptance, actualisation, contribution, coherence and integration. In a time when so many of us feel more disconnected than ever, this paper is both a diagnosis and an unfinished roadmap. Read more.

The mental health continuum: From languishing to flourishing in life

Keyes (2002) This is the paper that gave us the language of flourishing and languishing as states of mental health. It treated mental health as a syndrome of emotional, psychological and social wellbeing and applied a diagnostic approach parallel to (but independent of) psychiatric diagnosis. Only a minority of adults are flourishing. Moderate mental health is common. Languishing carries real costs. Read more.

Optimising wellbeing: the empirical encounter of two traditions

Keyes, Shmotkin & Ryff (2002) brought the hedonic and eudaimonic traditions into the same empirical conversation and showed they are related but distinct. Optimal wellbeing is rarer than either tradition alone would suggest. Read more.

Mental illness and/or mental health? Investigating axioms of the complete state model of mental health

Keyes (2005) tested the complete-state (dual-continua) model head-on. Mental health and mental illness are two correlated but separate dimensions. The absence of illness does not equal the presence of health. Completely mentally healthy adults function best. This paper is the empirical backbone for everything that followed. Read more.

Honourable mention that didn’t fit in my 10-year window:

Promoting and protecting mental health as flourishing: a complementary strategy for improving national mental health.
Keyes (2007). This one is seriously evergreen. A map for the distinction between promoting mental wellbeing and preventing mental illness. Published in American Psychologist. If my memory serves me well (and I could have checked this), this is the article where Corey perfectly illustrates the illogicity of delivering ‘risky behaviour awareness campaigns’ rather than promoting the things that drive health. Drawing on a story of a small American town that was noticing a rise in risky health behaviours in their young people. Because of the automatic reaction of health sectors, they started delivering ineffective public health campaigns about drugs and safe sex. What they eventually realised was the loneliness, the languishing, the disconnection that these young people were experiencing. Having family dinners where parents were either working, disengaged, or distracted.

Read more

How I encountered Corey’s work

When I first started in the promotion of mental wellbeing, circa 2015, we told people that we were here to work with the general population to help them to flourish.

We came from a very strong Seligman tradition and were promoting PERMA everywhere we went. And largely, that worked really well. People across South Australia resonated with Positive Emotions, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishment.

However, it really fell flat with those we wanted to influence: policymakers, clinicians, psychologists, health practitioners. I think they saw PERMA as an unvalidated, fluffy, public health campaign device (which I think it is, and that’s fine). Plus, when we looked at the data of the people we were working with, we saw that there really is no ‘healthy’ population, one where there is no distress and just people ready and waiting to flourish. In every workplace we went, we found 20% of people living with psychological distress (of course we did!)

This was about the complexity of the story we had at the time.

That led us to the research on the relationship between mental wellbeing and mental illness, and we found the dual-continua model. The work was so well received as we took it across the South Australian community that I still remember the disbelief: how has this model not been more widely adopted and better understood?

It led me to start my PhD on the relationship between mental health and wellbeing, and I became deeply influenced by Corey’s wider body of work. I still remember waking up in the middle of the night, checking my emails, and finding a reply from Corey saying he agreed to be a collaborator on a study I had designed. The absolute euphoria of that moment, fist pumping in my kitchen at 4.am - that somebody with no publications, very little experience, but real ambition could be listened to by someone of his stature - has stayed with me.

When I later introduced him on the first episode of the podcast, I said I believed he is the scientist, or amongst the scientists, who has given more to positive psychology than almost any other. Multiple seminal papers, the social wellbeing work, the psychological wellbeing work with Carol Ryff, one of the most used measures of mental wellbeing (which predicts longevity and future mental illness), and, most importantly from my perspective, the careful investigation of the relationship between mental well-being and mental illness. Ironically, Corey himself doesn’t strongly claim the positive-psychology label. That feels consistent with the seriousness of the work.

He has been a guide in more ways than one. He sometimes speaks with a kind of lament for the pace of the current academic world; people writing and publishing without really contending with the major ideas that came before. How many new models of flourishing appear that neither cite nor seriously engage earlier ones? How many measurement tools get released that make no attempt to map back to prior instruments? It’s part of why the field can feel so confused: people around the world shouting into their microphones without ever bothering to pick up the headphones*. Corey’s own papers stand as the opposite of that. They cite broadly across disciplines. They are written to address big questions. Their purpose is clear.

*As a general rule, I am guilty of everything I accuse others of.

What else is yet to be uncovered?

I’ve been so glad to see the dual-continua model finally getting more traction. It was pretty cool to see it included in the Department of Health Victoria’s Strategy for Wellbeing Promotion. The applications are almost endless: measurement, intervention, prevention, promotion, treatment, recovery. Once you see it, it’s a bit of a no-brainer. But there’s another gem from that same run that I don’t think has gotten nearly enough airtime yet: social wellbeing.

At a time when we’re all worried about loneliness, fractured communities, divisive politics, and a growing sense of malaise among young people, the concepts Corey laid out in 1998 — social contribution, social actualisation, social coherence, social integration, social acceptance — feel more valuable than ever. Nearly thirty years on, that paper still reads like a roadmap we haven’t fully used.

I highly recommend going back to the original work and considering its relevance in whatever you’re doing. It deserves more attention.

Thanks for reading along; hope to see you again here soon.

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From the Archives: This is Episode 1 of The Podcast.

Host Dr Matthew Iasiello sits down with Emeritus Professor Corey Keyes, to discuss Corey’s foundational work in the field of positive psychology, particularly on the concepts of flourishing and languishing.

Corey talks about languishing as a form of invisibility, it’s prevalence in society, and how it poses a risk factor for mental and physical illness.

They discuss the dual-continua model of mental illness and mental health, how this challenges traditional models of wellbeing, and Corey shares some fascinating stories about the origins of positive psychology.

Want to learn more?
Find out more about Corey’s research here.
This episode is also available on Spotify here.

If this is the kind of conversation you want more of, subscribe. We bring in the experts to answer the questions others won’t, bust myths, and go deeper into the science.

If you loved this ep and are already subscribed here on Substack, we’d love your support over on Spotify and YouTube.

One of the people in that room was a man named Dom, who ended up as a co-author on the grant application that followed. He had a way of describing it that stuck with everyone.

“You have to have this base of resilience to live well with myeloma. You have to keep that cup half full, because otherwise you’ll just fall apart.”

Dom wasn’t in crisis and that’s the point. He could feel the spiral starting well before anything reached the threshold where the system would step in, and he wanted something for that gap. Most of what exists in Australian mental health care sits on the other side of it, waiting for people to be distressed enough to qualify.

This episode is about what happened when we tried to build something for that gap, with A/Prof Hannah Wardill and Natalie Tuckey. It’s a wellbeing skills program we’d mostly run in workplaces, rebuilt with and for people living with multiple myeloma and smouldering myeloma, and now delivered in peer groups by Myeloma Australia’s specialist nurses.

Listen or watch the video below.

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There’s a lot in here for anyone who has tried to take a wellbeing program somewhere it hasn’t been before. Early on, when Hannah and Matt were going around pitching this to people in cancer care, they kept hearing the same thing back. “We already do wellbeing”… which was true. It just meant something completely different to what we meant, mostly symptom management and physical activity and diet.

Then there’s the part that will be familiar to anyone who has tried to prove a wellbeing program works. We’re running this as a randomised controlled trial, and Hannah is refreshingly blunt about the cost of that. Every participant walks in wanting something different. A bit more happiness. The confidence to raise something with their haematologist. Better relationships at home. All of them meaningful, and only one of them can be the primary endpoint.

“It’s inherently difficult to match rigorous clinical trial constraints with what is fundamentally central to wellbeing, which is that it’s a highly individualised process.”

The last ten minutes go somewhere else entirely. Natalie has done more than forty interviews for this project and never directly asked anyone about the end of their life, which she thinks says something about her own avoidance. Every single person raised it anyway. Nobody around them wanted to be the one to start that conversation, so most of them were carrying it alone.

What we get into

• Why mental health support mostly arrives once someone is already in crisis, and what a program built for the years before that looks like

• Why specialist myeloma nurses turned out to be the right people to deliver it, and what facilitating did for the nurses themselves

• Why this landed when the same content struggled in workplaces and universities

• What a lab scientist finds unnerving about wellbeing research the first time she meets it

• The participant who technically dropped out of the pilot and used what she’d learned anyway

• Why “fear of recurrence” might be a phrase we use to avoid saying something else

A/Prof Hannah Wardill leads the Supportive Oncology Research Group at the University of Adelaide and SAHMRI, where the focus is improving the lived experience of cancer. Natalie Tuckey is a health and clinical psychologist finishing her PhD on multiple myeloma and smouldering myeloma. You can connect with Nat and Hannah here.

If this is the kind of conversation you want more of, subscribe. We bring in the experts to answer the questions others won’t, bust myths, and go deeper into the science.

If you loved this ep and are already subscribed here on Substack, we’d love your support over on Spotify and YouTube.

This hour we covered a lot, including:

• Whether we’ve quietly removed some of the places people used to gather, in the name of making them safer and healthier

• Playgrounds, and what got taken away when we made them safe

• What a lighthouse actually tells you, and why that’s a problem for how we measure wellbeing

• Why a doctor will ask about your sleep, your diet and your heart, but mental wellbeing often stops at one question

• Who gets to define flourishing, and the thing people raise first that almost no measure asks about

• How many coping strategies you use on an average day, and why having three favourites isn’t the goal

Thank you to everyone who tuned in live. Join us next time for more casual yaps on all things wellbeing science.

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Ps. If you found the chat interesting, share it with someone to keep these conversations going.

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“I’m not passionate about coaching. I’ve picked coaching because it’s the most powerful tool we have to achieve the kinds of things that are important for me. If I found a better intervention, I wouldn’t be talking about coaching.”

What he’s actually interested in is much bigger, and much more useful if you work in wellbeing. It’s the question of whether there’s a way to show up to an interaction that increases the chance of it going well. He calls this positive presence, and the claim is that it travels. It works in a coaching session, and it also works picking your kid up from school, or walking into the office on a morning when you’d rather not talk to anyone.

Listen above or watch the video below.

There’s a challenge in here for those of us who like our evidence tidy. Christian argues that the research methods we currently have aren’t sophisticated enough for what’s really going on in a coaching conversation, and that “does coaching change behaviour” is a question that misses most of the value. He also has an answer for the organisations that ask him to teach a way of being in half a day.

What we get into

• Why Christian’s definition of coaching is now “creating ideal environments for learning”, and what he threw out to get there

• Positive presence, and two questions you can use to test your own

• The art and the science, and why the science should become invisible to the client

• What coaching research is measuring, and what it’s missing

• Why coaching individuals inside a dysfunctional organisation doesn’t work

• His practical test for choosing a coach, which involves being suspicious of good websites

Christian van Nieuwerburgh is professor of coaching and positive psychology at RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences. He’s the author of An Introduction to Coaching Skills, and co-author with Robert Biswas-Diener of Radical Listening: The Art of True Connection. You can find along with his work on Instagram.

If this is the kind of conversation you want more of, subscribe. We bring in the experts to answer the questions others won’t, bust myths, and go deeper into the science.

Subscribe now

If you loved this ep and are already subscribed here on Substack, we’d love your support over on Spotify and YouTube.

One of the concepts I focus on has to do with the perspectives we take. Where we focus our attention - our own inner world and our own behaviour, or the people and environment around us - and how this shapes our wellbeing.

Recently, someone asked me a question about two concepts that have to do with that topic, and how I saw them working together. So I thought I’d make a video and a resource about it, breaking down these two powerful ideas - Covey’s circles of influence and Rotter’s locus of control - and showing how they interplay to protect or indeed harm your mental health. Watch the video up top, and download the resource is a perk that can be accessed by paid subscribers.

I’d love to get your thoughts on the topic and how it lands with you, or whether you yourself have a different take on how they work together.

Ps. If you found the video interesting, share it with someone to keep these conversations going.

We talk about Ana and Kiira’s shared frustration that wellbeing is often treated as an afterthought in psychosis and psychiatry research. They both argue that mental health should be seen more holistically: not just “less sick,” but actually helping people flourish, make choices, and live well even when they’re facing illness. Are there other professionals out there in this space thinking the same thing about wellbeing?

A big theme in the episode is how current systems and research methods favor short-term, symptom-based outcomes, while wellbeing and prevention are harder to measure and take longer to show.

We discuss the need for better tools, better funding models, and more creative ways of proving the value of preventive psychology and wellbeing-focused interventions.

The take away for this ep? It’s time to shift mental health care toward a more integrated, person-centered, and preventive approach.

Enjoy the listen and let us know what you think in the comments!

Chapters

00:00 — Why wellbeing matters in mental health

The episode opens with a discussion on why mental health care should go beyond symptom reduction and also focus on wellbeing, agency, and quality of life.

12:00 — The measurement problem

The guests explore how current research tools and funding models prioritize symptoms and short-term outcomes, making wellbeing harder to study and easier to overlook.

28:00 — Prevention and intervention in practice

Ana shares a university-based prevention project using ecological momentary assessment, and the conversation turns to how wellbeing can be built into real-world interventions.

37:00 — Agency, autonomy, and lived experience

This section looks at the importance of supported decision-making, listening to people’s goals, and recognizing the gap between clinical priorities and what people actually want.

52:00 — Systems, structure, and change

The discussion closes on the limits of current healthcare systems, the need for better evidence models, and the case for integrating wellbeing into standard care rather than treating it as optional.

Want more?

• Connect: Find Kira on LinkedIn and see more of Ana’s work via ResearchGate, and as always, you can find Matt here

• More episodes of Researching Happy can be found on our YouTube here.

Researching Happy is a podcast all about the world of mental health and wellbeing research. Your host, Be Well Co’s Head of Data & Translation, Dr Matthew Iasiello interviews academics from different fields to explore their unique perspectives on happiness, the real challenges that they face, the latest research, and how it can make a difference in the real world.

About the guests

Our podcast host speaks to Ana Blasco-Belled, an Assistant Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Lleida in Spain, and Kiira Sarasjärvi, who has just submitted her doctorate in the mental health and wellbeing field and is based here in Melbourne, Australia. They are both focused on expanding mental health care beyond symptom management to include wellbeing, agency, and quality of life.

• The risks of de-skilling critical thinking, moral reasoning, and reflection by over-relying on AI

• Why friction, pushback, and discomfort are often essential for personal growth and flourishing

• Virtue ethics as a practical framework for evaluating AI in healthcare, education, and mental health

• Lessons from care robots and sex robots for today’s AI companion

• Practical ways to design “frictional AI” that supports — rather than replaces — human connection and development

• The balance between efficiency and human well-being in professional and personal contexts
  

Chapters
00:00 - Introducing the podcast and guest Anco Peeters
01:31 - AI and flourishing in the context of embodied cognition
02:38 - The concept of moral AI and future ethical dilemmas
04:51 - Impact of AI on our skills and reliance on technology
06:26 - Flourishing beyond positive psychology: a virtue ethics perspective
07:12 - Anco’s journey into AI and philosophy
09:24 - Ethical questions surrounding sex robots and addiction risks
11:57 - Chat systems, AI, and the risk of de-skilling mental health care
13:17 - Flourishing within virtue ethics: how virtues develop in life stories
14:53 - The divergence between positive psychology and virtue ethics on flourishing
16:42 - The importance of grounded, context-specific virtues
17:57 - Societal vs individual flourishing, with AI in education and healthcare
19:16 - Outsourcing tasks and critical skills to AI—what should we avoid?
23:07 - Risks of outsourcing reasoning, political judgment, and diagnosis
24:57 - The dangerous feedback loop of AI confirming user biases in mental health
26:26 - Challenges of keeping pace with AI’s rapid development and regulation
37:39 - Setting standards for good AI: virtue ethics as a guide
39:00 - Virtue ethics in the context of technological development: life stories and community roles
43:41 - How to determine virtues in diverse societies without strict universal rules
45:20 - Practical examples of AI and reflection in medicine and education
55:10 - Strategies for resisting or guiding AI development within organizations
58:02 - The value of friction in decision-making and learning, including embodied and moral friction
59:00 - The significance of Socratic questioning and constructive annoyance in critical thinking
61:00 - Future of AI promoting flourishing and the risks of monetization and data biases
66:43 - How listeners can connect with Anco Peeters and the importance of philosophical transparency

Want more?

• Connect: Follow Anco and

• More episodes of Researching Happy can be found on our YouTube here.

Researching Happy is a podcast all about the world of mental health and wellbeing research. Your host, Be Well Co’s Head of Data & Translation, interviews academics from different fields to explore their unique perspectives on happiness, the real challenges that they face, the latest research, and how it can make a difference in the real world.

Iasiello presents a clear diagnosis of the problem — with nearly 100 different measures using widely varying dimensions, the field struggles with research synthesis, policy impact, and clear communication. When studies claim to “improve wellbeing,” it’s often unclear what exactly is being measured or changed.He proposes a promising solution: the development of a flexible, modular taxonomy of positive mental health.

Drawing on a three-study program — including an umbrella review of 155 measures, in-depth item analysis, and a major Delphi consensus study with 122 leading international experts — Iasiello and his team identified 19 core dimensions that reached expert agreement.

The talk covers the resulting working definition of positive mental health, the tension between standardization and cultural nuance, and why a taxonomy (inspired by the successful Behavior Change Technique Taxonomy) could bring greater clarity without becoming a rigid “prison cell” for the field.

Iasiello discusses limitations, including the need for stronger cross-cultural validation and lived-experience perspectives, and outlines practical next steps for research, interventions, and policy.

This presentation offers both a critical look at the current state of wellbeing science and an optimistic, collaborative path forward. Whether you're a researcher, practitioner, or anyone passionate about human flourishing, this episode provides valuable insight into how we can make well-being science more coherent and impactful.

Perhaps upon closer scrutiny, these activities sit well with many others. People who wouldn’t necessarily be labelled as “zesty”. Your happy-go-lucky colleagues, the go-with-the-flow-ers. Perhaps many of us see them as a welcome distraction from the seriousness and mundaneness of everyday life.

But then there is me and my ‘group’. The ones who see a spirit animal in posts like these:

The active reincarnations of Grumpy Cat. Those with eternal resting b-faces. Not necessarily those that are fully devoid of life on the inside, but definitely not the person your average workshop facilitator hopes rocks up first to the session.

I, at best, feel discomfort when these types of activities occur around me. Occasionally, I experience active discontent. A real defensiveness that makes me want to rebel. I hear people talk about the positives of actively leaning into your inner child – to be playful and let your hair down. Have a bit of fun and all. And while I can rationalise about its benefits, doing it is a whole different ball game.

But while it may not feel fully natural to me to harness the benefits of play and playfulness, it doesn’t mean it couldn’t be beneficial to learn how to be. Plenty of things I don’t like are good for me, which got me thinking.

Can the joyless benefit from leaning more into fun and play? Is it something you can practice and obtain? Should I avoid going against my innate preferences, even if it may backfire? In other words, is there proverbial hope for my inner child or am I forever doomed to live my life as Oscar the Grouch?

P.s If you are Gen Z reading this, get ready for some wildly outdated memes and pop culture references from times when my life still had a faint resemblance of feeling ‘fun’. Let’s go.

What is this thing called joy?

I wanted to commence by exploring what we actually refer to when we talk about joy and fun. I want to better understand what it is I am supposed to experience when I sit through icebreakers. To do this, I did the most antithetical move I could think of and got stuck into scientific research on joy. How fun.

Anywho, this topic has received a bit of attention from people across a range of disciplines. A well-cited review on the topic of joy has been written by Matthew Kuan Johnson (2020), who dug deep into philosophical, theological, and psychological works on the topic.

Joy is often seen as a way to express positive affect. In other words, we think it is one part of our positive emotions and sensations. In his review, Johnson challenges this idea: while he does indicate that joy can be seen as a positive emotion, it is also much more than that, and simply seeing it as a positive emotion undersells the complexity of the experience. Joy can be analysed beyond the simple emotional expression. It can be seen as a mood, as well as a disposition, where certain people have a lower threshold to experience joy. In other words: joyful people truly exist, and as a consequence, so do Grinches like myself.

The paper outlines three interesting aspects of joy:

1. Like other emotions - joy can be experienced intensely and more sedate. In other words, the intensity of joy is one of its properties, not the defining feature. You can experience joy as childlike excitement, and you can experience it quieter. In other words, joy isn’t the same as pleasure or ecstasy. It can definitely take the form of excitement, but it can also be highly serene. In the absolute depth of feeling calm you can experience joy in its fullest.

2. Joy also isn’t a purely individual experience as it can be experienced with others. The majority of joy experiences are shared ones, an insight that blew my mind.

3. And interestingly joy can be based off anticipation (i.e. the good thing that causes joy is expected to come) or can be consummatory ( i.e. the good is here and you experience joy). This gives us a bunch of extra levers to pull when we think about harnessing joy, as we don’t have to have the physical trigger present; anticipation of it may be enough.

Johnson posits a very interesting definition of joy as being an emotion: a felt response to something good happening that genuinely matters to you and that you hoped for but didn’t presume. This definition highlights two key aspects that differentiate joy from pleasure and amusement. Let’s explore this using the example of watching a comedian.

1. Firstly, when you experience joy, there needs to be an element of surprise. If a comedian gives you a sense of joy, they need to have given you something you didn’t presume would happen. A punchline you can predict is less funny. If you keep rewatching the same romcom over and over again, the unexpected is taken out of the equation. You lean into comfort and pleasure, not joy.

2. To experience joy, the cause of joy needs to be personally relevant to you. A punchline that is funny but has no relevance to you can be amusing, but doesn’t lead to joy. It is pleasant, cortisol-reducing and worth doing, but it is low stakes. It becomes joy when it is high stakes, i.e. it matters to you. The comedian makes a funny joke about Dutch people, it has a higher chance to elicit joy in me compared to a joke about Polish people (the one exception being jokes about German people – they should elicit joy in everyone, but I digress)

How does having fun relate to joy?

Joy and fun are real partners in crime, but they differ fundamentally. Oh and Pham (2022) positions fun as needing to be a liberating engagement: a temporary release from your everyday restrictions, via an activity you’re absorbed in purely for the enjoyment of it. It has two pillars:

• Pillar 1: Hedonic engagement: You are fully absorbed in the activity, for its own sake and the pleasure that comes from it. You don’t have external goals and it isn’t about things like ‘scores’. Adding a competitive angle makes the fun seep away.

• Pillar 2: Sense of liberation: You feel temporarily released, from internalised restrictions such as work, duties, diets, self-monitoring etc. Fun includes freedom from something.

This means we can create a good old quadrant that pinpoints where fun sits compared to other pleasant experiences.

Having fun is a property of experiences you have or behaviours you do, while joy is the emotion you may experience as a result of it. Importantly, neither requires the other. For example, you can experience immense joy but not ‘have fun’, think of the birth of a child or someone giving you an unexpected compliment. Or you can have fun, but not experience joy, for example, watching a comedy movie.

Although they aren’t necessary ingredients, having fun - particularly shared fun - is a reliable way to get you to joy or, at a minimum, pleasure. The issue with both fun and joy is that they can’t easily be ordered on demand. Having fun is an experience, and joy is an emotion. So what’s left to actually work with? Enter my mortal enemy: (trivial) play.

Leaning into play and playfulness as a way to experience more fun

Play is a typical behaviour many lean into to experience fun and joy. It sits upstream of both. If you play, you are absorbed in an activity for no reason beyond the activity itself, and it should be fenced off from ordinary obligations. Play doesn’t guarantee fun, but it increases its likelihood.

It pays to want to play, and that’s where things get interesting. The willingness to play, i.e., playfulness, turns out to be trainable. René Proyer and his colleagues spent a decade looking into playfulness in adults, showing that it is a real, stable trait, but one we can work with. According to the two gentlemen, playful people have the tendency to work with everyday situations so that they are experienced as entertaining, interesting, or personally engaging. People high in playfulness see life through the prism of play. In 2017, Proyer wrote an article outlining the OLIW model, showing that there are different forms of playfulness:

• Other-directed: playful with people: banter, good-natured teasing, and using play to ease tension and bring others together.

• Lighthearted: the carefree, improvised approach to life: spontaneous, unworried, happy to see where the day goes.

• Intellectual: playing with ideas: wordplay, puzzles, and turning problems over for the sheer pleasure of it.

• Whimsical: amused by the odd and unusual: private rituals, a taste for the strange, finding the absurd in the everyday.

This gives people like me something to work with. I don’t have to feed into the top 2 parts, which are arguably those feeding the cultural stereotypes I resonate least with. No need to drink the tuna water. Rather, I can lean into the bottom 2 that I identify more with

So do extraverts have an advantage over me?

The earlier research seems to suggest that it doesn’t matter whether you are extraverted or introverted, loud or quiet. We can all learn to leverage play – and other activities - to create a sense of fun and experience joy (or pleasure). It isn’t simply something that the zesty extraverts benefit from.

That said, there is a catch, as they do have a slight upper hand, it seems. They are generally more prone to joy, but as per usual, it is complicated.

For example, Lucas and Baird (2004) ran a bunch of studies testing whether extraverts react more strongly to pleasant stimuli. They largely don’t, but they do seem to have a slight advantage related to so-called activated positive states (e.g. excitement). This is also supported by others, including work by Smillie and colleagues (2013;2015) showing that extraverts light up when there’s something to chase, and for them that response shows up as excitement and energy. They don’t respond any more strongly than the rest of us to things that are simply pleasant, like a nice video or a calm, enjoyable moment.

Which explains the love for a good old icebreaker. For extraverts, it is full of rewards: attention, laughs, people to win over. It is something they want, and getting it generates a buzz. Mine registers nothing worth chasing, so I get smacked with awkwardness. For me, it makes me feel like I need to perform (i.e., it is pressure), whether for them it is not, so long as they feel they want it.

And that is an important takeaway. Anything can be enjoyable so long as it fits your preferences. Some may have some innate advantage over others, but how this shows up is largely fuelled by satisfying a want. When people like me feel flat at the icebreaker, we’re not failing at joy. We were measured on the excitement register and don’t really want it that much.

But joy is about more than excitement. Having fun can be about by a range of activities, not just the stereotypical ones. So the message is clear. All hope is not lost. I can learn how to lean more into experiencing fun and play, and playfulness is a disposition I can nourish, but I am wise to make sure I don’t push boundaries too hard as this may backfire. Lyubomirsky and Layous’ (2013) person-to-intervention fit immediately comes to mind: their model of positive activities holds that whether an activity improves wellbeing depends on how well it matches the person doing it, not just on the exercise itself.

What seems vital is appropriate matching, as joy and a sense of fun are destroyed by the same enemies: obligation and force. And this point is important for any professional wanting to utilize play, fun & joy in their work, and for those who are seeking to lean into it personally a bit more. The literature gives some clear suggestions, which I will detail for our paid subscribers below.

How to make play, fun, and joy work in our work

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Starting from a prescient thought experiment about “Google Morals,” Anco explains how we’ve rapidly moved from hypothetical worries about outsourcing ethics to everyday reality with large language models. The conversation explores:

• The risks of de-skilling critical thinking, moral reasoning, and reflection by over-relying on AI

• Why friction, pushback, and discomfort are often essential for personal growth and flourishing

• Virtue ethics as a practical framework for evaluating AI in healthcare, education, and mental health

• Lessons from care robots and sex robots for today’s AI companions

• Practical ways to design “frictional AI” that supports — rather than replaces — human connection and development

• The balance between efficiency and human well-being in professional and personal contexts

Whether you’re optimistic or concerned about AI’s role in our lives, this episode offers nuanced, thought-provoking insights grounded in philosophy and cognitive science. Anco makes a compelling case for human-centered AI development that prioritizes long-term flourishing over short-term convenience.

This is the fascinating phenomenon known as fear of happiness (or aversion to happiness), explored in depth by cross-cultural psychologist Dr. Mohsen Joshanloo. In our recent podcast conversation, he unpacked this counterintuitive but fascinating idea that challenges our usual assumptions about wellbeing. Here’s what we can learn from the research.

What “Fear of Happiness” Actually Means

Dr. Joshanloo describes it, not as a clinical phobia, but as a set of negative feelings or hesitations toward experiencing or expressing strong positive emotions. People might think:

“If I get too happy, something bad could happen.”

“It’s safer not to aim for extreme happiness.”

“I shouldn’t show it too openly.”

This fear we carry is mostly about emotional happiness, that is intense positive feelings or fortune rather than steadier forms like purpose, good relationships, or personal growth (otherwise known as eudaimonic wellbeing). It’s a subtle aversion as well: a sense that soaring too high invites a fall.

It’s More Common Than You Think, with Strong Cultural Differences

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They discuss Fisher’s book How to Create Societies for Human Well-being, which integrates philosophy, psychology, and public health to argue that societies must be intentionally designed to support human flourishing rather than undermine it.

The conversation explores how social environments drive chronic stress through threats to coping ability and social standing, contributing to widespread mental ill-health (especially among young people). Fisher presents wellbeing as an active process—the development and exercise of “wellbeing abilities” (a capabilities-like approach) that require both personal resources and supportive external conditions. Key themes include balancing goal-directed action with rest, social connection, creativity, contact with nature, and sufficiency; the harms of inequality, discrimination, neoliberal ideology, digital media, and separation from nature; and practical ideas for wellbeing-oriented policies at local and societal levels.

They critique the current trajectory of materialist, hustle-driven cultures and biomedical-focused mental health approaches, while highlighting promising examples from places like Scandinavia, Scotland, and Wales, along with prevention efforts in Australia.

The episode emphasizes clear thinking about what truly supports thriving and calls for shifting from reactive treatment to proactive societal design. It’s an insightful, balanced discussion for anyone interested in mental health, public policy, and creating better conditions for people to live well.

Today’s piece is written by Tegan Davies, Head of Programs at Be Well Co, whose lens is always: what would this actually look like in real life? She’s only interested in wellbeing science that turns into everyday habits.

What this Know-How covers

• What self-acceptance actually is (and what it isn’t)

• The psychology behind how self-acceptance works

• Why self-compassion is the practice that builds it

• How our inner critic quietly undermines us, and what that costs

• What self-acceptance looks like in practice

But before I start, here’s a little confession from me…

What is self-acceptance?

In its simplest form, we can think about self-acceptance as unconditional self-regard Or as Carol Ryff (one of the most cited researchers in the field of psychological wellbeing) puts it, knowing yourself honestly, the good and the not so good, and not spending your life wishing you were someone different. Doesn’t that sound lovely?

Research using Ryff’s framework consistently finds that self-acceptance is among the strongest predictors of happiness and life satisfaction and is inversely associated with depressive symptoms. It sits at the centre of what it means to be psychologically well.

In our own peer-reviewed research, conducted with 122 international experts across 11 disciplines, self-acceptance emerged as one of 19 core dimensions of wellbeing.

Which, when you think about how rarely we actually talk about it, says something.

How self-acceptance works: the psychology behind it

Understanding the mechanism behind self-acceptance changes how we think about building it. It’s not just a mindset shift, our biology is involved.

Professor Paul Gilbert, founder of Compassion Focused Therapy, proposes that we have three evolved emotion regulation systems. You may have come across these in our Calmness Know-How.

The threat system that helps us detect and respond to danger, activated by fear, anxiety, and self-criticism. The drive system pushes us to achieve, compete, and accomplish, activated by motivation and striving. And the soothing system, the one that allows us to rest, recover, connect, and feel safe, is activated by warmth, kindness, and compassion.

When we are self-critical, we activate the threat system. We become, in effect, both the source of the threat and the one under attack (let that sink in for a second…). The body responds accordingly: our stress hormones rise, our nervous system braces, and we enter a state of internal conflict that is physiologically costly. And the soothing system, where calm, contentment, and self-acceptance live, stays out of reach.

A core path towards self-acceptance is the practice of self-compassion.

Self-acceptance is the state: I can acknowledge who I am, including the difficult parts, without needing it to be different.

Self-compassion is the practice: the active warmth and kindness we direct toward ourselves, especially when things go wrong.

Kristin Neff, who has spent over two decades building the evidence base for self-compassion, describes it as having three components:

1. Mindfulness: noticing what we’re feeling without suppressing it

2. Common humanity: recognising that difficulty and imperfection are part of being human, and not evidence of personal failure

3. Self-kindness: responding to ourselves with warmth rather than judgement

Self-compassion is one of the most reliable routes into self-acceptance because of what it does at a physiological level. It shifts us out of threat mode and into the soothing system, changing the internal conditions under which we relate to ourselves.

And it does so not by lowering our standards or letting ourselves off the hook, but by making the environment inside our own heads a bit less hostile. Which is an often-misunderstood element of self-compassion.

Something worth mentioning here, that for people who’ve experienced significant criticism, shame, or trauma, self-compassion can initially feel uncomfortable or even quite destabilising. If the feeling of warmth and kindness hasn’t been reliably present in the past, being kind to ourselves can feel very foreign. The soothing system needs time to come online.

Meet your inner critic, or as I like to call it, the itty bitty sh*tty committee

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His argument: the foundational concept underpinning stepped care models isn’t just limiting wellbeing: it’s empirically flawed…and fixing the existing system might be the wrong question entirely.

This 16-minute recording makes the case for a parallel system with wellbeing at its core. One that has its own measurement methods, interventions, competency frameworks, and regulations and, importantly, building blocks that already exist.

Watch and let us know what you think.

Aaron discusses his leadership approach, which emphasizes enabling others, and reflects on career highlights beyond metrics (e.g., student successes).

The core discussion focuses on the upcoming 12th European Conference on Positive Psychology (ECPP), where Aaron serves as co-chair of the academic committee. He is highly enthusiastic about its innovative philosophy: greater interdisciplinarity, genuine debate and extended audience conversations (not just Q&A), meaningful networking, audience participation via QR codes, video abstracts for broader access, and a playful, non-hierarchical vibe. The conference theme centers on positive health (body meeting mind) and boldly tackling major global challenges like war, poverty, climate change, and non-communicable diseases.

Aaron sees it as a watershed moment for the field — an opportunity to address stagnation, lack of clear direction/leadership, and the need for a fresh, collaborative community vision (moving beyond Martin Seligman’s original framing). He highlights the transparent, democratic committee process and the influx of fresh talent/future leaders. Broader reflections include:

• Positive psychology/wellbeing science embedding successfully in established disciplines (e.g., education).

• The value of better questions, sustainable wellbeing, and translation to policy/practice.

• Challenges like conceptual clarity, integration with psychology, and avoiding insularity.

It is a big survey of 12,000+ people, comparing different industries on psychosocial hazards and indicators of mental health challenges (burnout and psychological distress), as well as SuperFriend’s own composite measure of a thriving workplace.

The report aims to give a nationally representative picture of workplace mental health across Australian industries, and to do a bit of cheeky lead-gen for SuperFriend while they are at it. Let’s look at some of the headline results, as well as some of the more nuanced signals we picked up on.

1. Workplace thriving isn’t moving over time

The 2025 results are comparable to the 2024 results, and when comparing them to SuperFriend’s Decade in Data review, which they published two years ago, they show remarkably little change over time.

68.4 out of 100 and the dial isn’t moving.

If you look at what organisations are doing most well in, its connectedness and safety, whereas improvement is needed in leadership support and work design. The worst performing for Australian organisations? Providing their staff with skills and resources to manage mental health.

2. The awareness paradox: workers are struggling despite increased efforts to help them

A big standout is that the report points to a clear paradox. What do I mean by that? Well, there has been a decade of effort that has genuinely improved the awareness and stigma picture. So, that’s good news, right?

The problem is, we aren’t seeing meaningful movement on follow-up outcomes. For example, burnout and distress has only improved marginally and are still affecting the majority of the workforce.

A staggering 53.9% of the Australian workforce is in moderate to severe distress. This is not promising news. Something isn’t working.

At the same time, SafeWork Australia data shows that claims have more than doubled (up 161%) with roughly 1 in 8 serious workers' comp claims now being for a mental health condition. This comes at 3x the cost of other workers' comp claims. And when it comes to time off, a serious mental health claim results in 4x more time away than other claims… that's a median of 30.7 weeks lost per serious mental health claim.

3. We aren't recognising our staff, and it's the easiest psychosocial hazard to fix

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