Improving Your Psychological Well-Being May Help Lower Dementia Risk

On the surface, the concept of positive well-being seems pretty simple.
It is often used interchangeably with concepts such as happiness and quality of life, and is perceived by many people in the general public as a sense that your life is going well. But well-being is a complex state that incorporates your mental and physical health, as well as the way you think about your life.

“We’re complicated beings, so it stands to reason that well-being is a complicated subject,” says Greg Fricchione, MD, Associate Chief of Psychiatry and Director of the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind-Body Medicine.

And over the past 20 years or so, researchers have found that well being may have a significant impact on your cognitive health later in life. A study published recently in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease suggests that bolstering your spiritual fitness and psychological well-being with practices such as meditation and other relaxation behaviors
can help undercut threats to cognition, including stress, depression, high blood pressure, and poor sleep. That study focused on the positive benefits associated with Kirtan Kriya, a simple, 12-minute meditative practice, but any number of behaviors may help prevent cognitive disability.

A 2017 study in the Annals of Behavioral Medicine, for example, found that greater well-being was strongly associated with being more physically active— an established factor that supports cognition throughout life.

Stress vs. Resilience

One way to think about well-being is to examine the ratio of stress to resilience in your own life, explains Dr. Fricchione. If life’s important needs are being met, and you have the ability to effectively deal with challenges to those needs, you are more likely to live a life of positive well-being. “If you’re separated from these needs, it’s going to cause you a lot of stress and sap your resilience,” he says, noting that the world has been experiencing a once-in-a-century stressor in the form of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has forced people to dig deep and reach out to remain resilient.

“Well-being is a place we can get to if we can modulate stress and enhance resilience.”

Dr. Fricchione explains that through millions of years of evolution, humans have developed four basic attachments that are necessary for their well-being:

• Attachment to food, the source of metabolic energy, and personal safety. Well-being is out of reach for people who don’t have enough food or shelter to sustain good health.
• Sexual attachments, at least during certain stages of life. The species relies on reproduction to survive, and as individuals we often gain many components of well-being (emotional security, purpose in life, etc.) through our relationship with a partner.
• Attachment to social objects, including family members, friends,
  neighbors and others in our orbit. “As infants we absolutely need a secure attachment to a parental object,” Dr. Fricchione says.
• Attachment to the future. “We set goals throughout our lives,” Dr. Fricchione says. “Think of how it feels when someone sets a roadblock to your goals. If your future looks bleak, that’s a big strain on your sense of well-being.”

You may be familiar with another presentation of fundamental human
needs: Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, a list assembled by American psychologist Abraham Maslow to explain behavioral motivation. According to Maslow, certain needs must be met before a person can achieve increasingly higherlevel goals. At the foundation of his list, which is often presented as a pyramid, are physiological needs, such as food, water, and rest. That’s followed by safety needs, including a sense of security. Think of the basic components of psychological first aid provided in disaster response. From there human needs include belongingness and love, esteem (prestige and feelings of accomplishment), and then self-actualization—the achievement of one’s full potential.

“When you start meeting these levels of need, you build up that inner capital that allows you to feel well-being,” Dr. Fricchione says, emphasizing that connections to other people are the building blocks of healthy well-being. “We recognize that once we take care of those basic needs, the most important thing is to take care of those social attachments. The more we can do that, the more we can bolster well-being.”

Spiritual Fitness and Well-Being

In the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease study, researchers noted that “spiritual fitness,” a term that describes a person’s ability to hold on to spiritual beliefs, values, and principles, can be a mighty force in bolstering well-being. While that study examined spirituality through the lens of a particular meditative practice, Dr. Fricchione says that the spirituality component of your well-being can take on many forms.

Your faith may be strengthened by regularly attending religious services, for example, or you may not choose to follow a particular religion. But having a connection to something greater than yourself, and, by extension, having a connection to the larger human community, can be a powerful tool in enhancing your resilience, especially during challenging times.

Identifying Well-Being

While it’s helpful to understand the needs and attachments that form the building blocks of well-being, you may be able to determine your own level of well-being by examining your feelings and behaviors.

People with positive well-being have an optimistic outlook. They are hopeful about uncertain outcomes and they look forward to good health and happiness in the years ahead. Other characteristics of well-being include gratefulness and open expressions of gratitude. Having purpose in life, whether it’s taking care of a partner or family member, working, volunteering, or in some way having the sense that what you do is important to someone else, is an important component of well-being.

At the same time, your personal interests and behaviors—including exercise, a healthy diet, sufficient sleep, and other healthy behaviors—should be supporting positive well-being. If they aren’t, it may be time to reconsider making a change. Are you doing things that are making you feel stressed, bored, or unhappy? Can you stop the behavior or start doing things differently? Likewise, are there things you want to be doing but aren’t for whatever reason? Do you miss playing the piano, for example? Consider the benefits of investing in a piano or keyboard and taking lessons again.

And, as you might imagine, well-being is also associated with the health of your personal relationships and how well you navigate the changing nature of the relationships in your life. It doesn’t matter whether you have a large family or a small one, or whether you have a wide social circle or a few close friends. The key is whether those relationships are positive influences in your life. “We achieve well-being in a social setting,” Dr. Fricchione says, noting that as social creatures, we need interaction with others to feel fulfilled.

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