BACKGROUND: During my freshman year at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I took a course called "The Art and Science of Human Flourishing" (PSYCH120). This course which is exclusively offered to freshman (now open to all students during the summer term!) teaches students about important aspects of human flourishing such as compassion, mindfulness, and diversity.
The course is designed to teach students "perspectives related to human flourishing from the sciences and humanities; investigate themes such as transformation, resilience, compassion, diversity, gratitude, community; expand self-awareness, enhanced social connectivity, and ability to change; formulate a sense of what it means to lead a flourishing life that sustains meaningful and fulfilling engagement with studies, relationships, community, and career."
What is "Human Flourishing"?
The official definition of human flourishing is defined as the ability to live a good life.
However, it's important to realize that the definition human flourishing is not some abstract concept but is individualized and diverse. Human flourishing is dependent on who as well as what one is, and it is thus not identical across persons but unique. This means that each individual's definition of human flourishing is not the same—instead, human flourishing can be defined by each individual’s unique talents, potentialities, and circumstances with generic goods and virtues.
Human flourishing embraces our shared humanity and serves everyone’s interest. All people should have the conditions for flourishing and realizing their ability to be healthy. They can use their values, talents, and abilities in pursuit of their own goals and health.
Human flourishing is agent-relative. It is always and necessarily the good for some person. It is not merely that flourishing occurs or takes place within some person’s life. Rather, it arises and obtains in relationship to some person’s life.
Why Human Flourishing is Important
Human flourishing is important because it promotes the growth, development, and holistic well-being of individuals and populations. It serves as a moral basis for what it means to be a human being. If we desire individuals’ abilities to flourish, we will be better equipped to analyze and shape health policy and public health. We can better achieve health equity worldwide. Having a thorough understanding of the conditions that enable human flourishing will promote safety and security in people’s lives. This includes health, economic, community, financial, political, and more.
A flourishing person is living a good, fulfilling life, a life with a sense of purpose. They have the ability to do what they want to do and be who they want to be. They have, and are committed to building, good mental health, physical health, and social health in all areas of their lives and those of their community members. This includes family, work, education, community, politics, economics, and more.
A flourishing person has the ability to help their bodies thrive, their emotional needs met, the trust and cooperation to function in social settings, and the ability to use their reason for individual and collective ends.
The Main Components to Human Flourishing
Transformation: the fundamental capacity for change (e.g. brain plasticity).
Plasticity is the transformational capacity of change through the brain and body. Human beings are special because they possess the capacity to transform intentionally through the mind. We are able to change negative habits/behaviors through intention and effort.
Resilience: the capacity of the mind, brain, and body to rapidly route and effectively recover from adversity (e.g. shorter recovery time during stressful situations).
Stress has a lot to do with resilience because in moments of stress you have to either decide to be resilient or to be defeated. In order to have resilience you need to overcome times of stress and rise above them instead of letting them harm you. In order to flourish and become more resilient, we need to be aware of how we deal with stress and trauma and how we cope with those things in our lives to become resilient to those environments. Another part of being resilient is also being hopeful of a better future for not only ourselves but for others around us.
Mindfulness: a mental state achieved by focusing one's awareness on the present moment, while calmly acknowledging and accepting one's feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations (e.g. focus).
Salience of our virtues and goals help us pay attention and stay focused; however, not everything we do in our day-to-day lives relates to our goals or virtues which leads us lose focus. However, if we teach ourselves that it is important to stay focused regardless of the situation then we are able to pay more attention to the situations in our daily lives and create a better well-being.
Emotions: awareness of emotions can motivate us to work towards achieving a more pleasant emotional state. (e.g. Emotional (Affect) Circumplex, “Emotion vs Reasoning").
“Emotionally oriented” people are driven (behaviorally and cognitively) by their emotions, which is classified in Western Culture as “impulsive, stupid, and a ‘problem’”. Those ideas can manifest into a negative self-image. Experiential blindness is how our brains use predictions from past experiences to make sense of our world (which can also be influenced by our emotions).
Interdependence: the social exchange components of personal relationships (e.g. community).
Human relationships are a cost versus reward scenario with individuals trying to minimize costs and increase the benefits within the relationship. Through small and large actions everyday, human beings are collaborative creatures that have evolved to work together within communities. It’s important to have the cycle of reciprocity in our communities which in return makes them stronger and makes relationships deeper.
Compassion and Empathy
Compassion is the feeling that arises while one witnesses another’s suffering and motivates their desire to help. Empathy is when one witnesses the negative emotions they mirror the emotion of the other person.
Diversity: the practice or quality of including or involving people from a range of different social and ethnic backgrounds and of different genders, sexual orientations, etc.
Educate yourself on the different ways that make everyone different because it's what makes us special, unique and brings a lot more positivity to the world. It's important to educate people on the experiences that people from other cultural backgrounds experience. Also, by encouraging a more accepting mindset when it comes to diversity, instead of disregarding or diminishing it—which is harmful.
Identity: an individual's sense of self defined by a set of physical, psychological, and interpersonal characteristics that is not wholly shared with any other person as well as a range of affiliations and social roles (e.g. the independent self vs the interdependent self).
The socialization of our cultures can create strong ideas regarding our identity, while this can benefit one's development of identity ... it shouldn't mean that we lack any less importance if we don't follow the norms of our culture. Independent self is a completely "self-centered" point of view where a person's behavior and actions are organized completely around their own thoughts and feelings without taking other people's opinions or feelings into consideration. Interdependent self is a view of the self (self-construal) that emphasizes one's involvement in a network of social relationships and that downplays one's separateness and unique traits or accomplishments.
Biases and Values
We use our "System 1" thinking to motivate our actions and create false perceptions of our realities (e.g. implicit biases). "System 2" thinking involved becoming aware of the differing ideas and perceptions of reality. For example, let's say that your "System 1" believes that everyone in world is evil/hurtful. By utilizing "System 2" thinking, you reflect on the fact that if you don't know a person very well you cannot make an assumption about who they are ... good or bad.
Courage: the ability to meet a difficult challenge despite the physical, psychological, or moral risks involved in doing so.
"Sometimes when I am courageous, things go for the better, and sometimes they don't but for me... the unpredictability of courage is the scariest part." An example of courage is having solidity in your values and beliefs while experiencing a situation that may test your values and beliefs. Being courageous while facing unpredictable situations is beneficial for personal growth.
How to Flourish
At the individual level of human flourishing, we can develop our abilities to flourish by
1. Being committed to growing within, and developing, supportive and cultivating environments that form our capabilities.
2. Believing in ourselves and our abilities
3. knowing about our health and how to be healthy.
4. being self-motivated to achieve the goals that we and society value.
At the community level of human flourishing, we must be surrounded and supported by, and contribute collaboratively to, strong support systems, institutions, resources, norms, and security that will help us all flourish.
What does Human Flourishing Look Like During COVID-19?
For our final project, other students and I created a video about human flourishing during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the video we talked about a few of the components of human flourishing and what that looked like during such a unprecedented time in world history.
Personal Statement
A personal statement of thanks and graditude for the Art and Science of Human Flourishing course!