The state of calm in wellbeing science

Have we been measuring the wrong half of positive emotion? Be Well Co’s in house psychologist Esme Fabry wondered about the essence of Calm, and what the research says globally about cultures that prioritse calm, vs those who don’t. Most wellbeing science has focused on high-arousal positive states: excitement, enthusiasm, joy. The kind of emotions that look good in a highlight reel.Low-arousal positive states: calm, peace, contentment have largely been an afterthought. Embedded within broader constructs, rarely studied in their own right.

So, why is that a problem?

When you actually ask people what wellbeing feels like to them, the picture looks very different from what the research has prioritised. Across 12 countries and five continents, researchers asked people to define happiness. Low-arousal qualities like peace of mind, harmony, and contentment appeared in roughly 30% of descriptions. High-arousal qualities like joy and vitality? Around 14%. People are describing a good life in terms the research hasn’t been properly measuring. In a landmark study of over 121,000 people across 116 countries, a majority in all but two preferred a calm life over an exciting one: including, slightly more so, in Western countries. The assumption that calm is a niche cultural preference – more “Eastern” than “Western” – doesn’t hold up.

What does hold up, is this:

Calm isn’t just the absence of stress. It’s a positive state in its own right, one that uniquely predicts life satisfaction, reduced anxiety and depression, and overall flourishing – even after accounting for high-arousal positive states. In Be Well Co’s own peer-reviewed research, calmness reached 75.5% consensus among 122 international experts as a core component of mental wellbeing. There’s also a structural dimension that wellbeing practice often glosses over. The gap between wanting calm and actually experiencing it was widest in countries with the greatest material precarity. Calm isn’t just a mindset or a skill. For many people, it’s a function of safety, stability, and circumstance.

Which raises a question worth sitting with if you work in this space: are your frameworks, interventions, and language implicitly rewarding high energy and activation – while treating rest, ease, and presence as softer priorities? Most wellbeing practice carries a high-arousal bias. It’s baked into how we measure success, how we talk about thriving, and what we implicitly signal is worth working toward. Recognising that is the starting point.

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