#21 The state of calm in wellbeing science
Calmness is globally sought, but its importance has been underscored and undervalued in Western psychology and wellbeing science. Here's what the science actually tells us
Calmness is one of the most universally desired human experiences, and yet our understanding of it in the literature is surprisingly lacking. Our models of wellbeing have overinvested in high-energy positive states like excitement, enthusiasm, and joy, and systematically undervalued lower-energy ones: calm, peace, and contentment.
The science tells us that calmness isn’t merely the absence of stress and anxiety; it is a positive state in its own right, with both a psychological and a physiological dimension. It’s distinct, significant, and almost universally sought. As wellbeing professionals, the frameworks we work from shape what we notice, what we measure, and what we help people build. If our models of wellbeing are missing something, so is our practice.
We need to reframe how we think about calm, not as the absence of distress, but as a resource to actively cultivate for the betterment of health, wellbeing, and relationships.
This is a two-part series. In Part 1, we look at how researchers have considered calm and key theoretical underpinnings, why the evidence suggests it deserves more attention, and what global data reveal about who actually gets to experience it. In Part 2, we’ll cover evidence-based strategies for building it.
What Know-How are we creating?
How wellbeing research has historically overlooked low-arousal positive states like calm, and why this matters
What Affect Valuation Theory tells us about how culture shapes what we want to feel
What global data reveal about who values calm, who experiences it, and why the gap exists
Why the East vs. West story is more complicated than it sounds
What this means for how we practise
Emotions aren’t good or bad
To understand calm, we first need to understand the difference between high- and low-energy positive states.
James Russell’s Circumplex Model of Affect (1980) proposes that emotions can be mapped along two dimensions:
Valence — how pleasant or unpleasant something feels
Arousal — how activated or energised it is
This framework helped us move away from thinking of emotions in terms of “positive” and “negative” and instead consider the quality and intensity of feelings. From this lens, we can distinguish:
High-arousal positive states (HAPS), including emotions like excitement, enthusiasm, elation, joy
Low-arousal positive states (LAPS), including emotions like calmness, peace, relaxation, contentment
