Are happiness and wellbeing the same?

Happiness and wellbeing are concepts that are abstract, ambiguous, and can be difficult to define.  In addition, many people define both happiness and well-being differently.  Happiness is one of many hundreds of emotions that people can experience.  Happiness is an emotional state often characterized by other emotions such as joy, satisfaction, contentment, and more.  Happiness is usually known as a positive or comfortable emotion that people want to experience or look forward to experiencing.  Happiness usually brings about a feeling of satisfaction.

Well-being can also be defined in many different ways.  Typically, well-being is about quality of life, what is good for that person to make their life healthy and well balanced in the areas that are important to them.  It typically means being physically healthy, emotionally healthy, spiritually healthy, environmentally healthy, financially healthy, intellectually healthy, occupationally healthy, and socially healthy. All of these different aspects can overlap or impact one another. Each of these dimensions or categories can promote the overall quality of life.

Neither well-being nor happiness has the ability to be present constantly.  Because happiness is an emotion, it fades and comes and goes.  It may be more important for someone to think about being content instead of happy because happiness comes and goes in life, similar to anger, sadness, joy, and other emotions.  Well-being is about being healthy, and there are times in everyone’s life that we do not make healthy decisions.  Being well and being healthy can bring about happiness. However, they are not the same thing.  Someone can be healthy physically or financially stable and not be happy with their life because they are in employment they despise or are in an unhealthy relationship.

A person can be happy with being overweight and be in a healthy relationship. However, that does not mean they have a sense of well-being.  While well-being is based on a person’s values and what they deem important to themselves, well-being also incorporates a sense of healthiness into a person’s life.  Often people use the terms well-being and happiness interchangeably. However, they are different.  Well-being is about overall health, and happiness is an emotion usually that coincides with day-to-day life.