Long-term decline in personal well-being: What you can do to buck the trend

Last year we shared the latest data from the UK government’s National Measure of Well-being Dashboard. This month (May 2024) new data has been published and it makes disappointing reading.

The data is gathered from lots of different sources – things like the Annual Population Survey and the Opinions and Lifestyle Survey – that means the data is updated on a different timeline, but there were several new updates in May 2024.

Personal well-being is one of the 10 domains looked at. According to the ONS, “it’s the most direct representation of how people are doing”. How people are doing is really all about how they feel about their lives. The domain looks at life satisfaction, whether we feel the things we do in life are worthwhile and how anxious and happy we feel.

Unfortunately, the latest data shows no improvements in feeling worthwhile or happy. Things haven’t got worse, but they haven’t got better either.

Unfortunately, we are seeing a long-term increase in feelings of anxiety. In October to December 2023, 23.5% of UK adults rated their anxiety the previous day as high. This reveals a long-term negative change from 20.0% in October to December 2018.

Loneliness has linked to increased risk of premature death. Loneliness is not necessarily about being alone. Even if you are with other people, you can feel alone and isolated. Here again, the latest government data makes sombre reading.

In April 2024, 7.8% of adults in Great Britain reported feeling lonely often or always. This is up marginally from 7.0% in April 2023.

So, what can be done to help more people feel less anxious and more satisfied with their lives?

We find it useful to look at this issue through the prism of the I, WE and IT dimensions. What we can do (the IT), comes last. First, it’s important to look at the I dimension and how satisfied we are with ourselves and how we show up every day. If we’re not feeling happy in ourselves, there is very little we can do to improve our relationships (WE) and what we do (IT).

It may sound simple, but even breathing in the right way can help improve how we feel in the I dimension. Take a look at Katie Ledger’s blog on breathing for emotional control. Breathing in the right way is fundamental to our emotional control. Breathing rhythmically and evenly, with our attention on our heart, enables us to bring coherence to our Heart Rate Variability (HRV) signal. This is a key action we can take to improve the I dimension of ourselves.

Taking things on a step further, we can start to create the positive emotional state that could increase our feelings of happiness and reduce our feelings of loneliness. Dr Alan Littlefield’s blog on happiness could be a help in this area.

Alan explains how we can rehearse the emotional state of ‘happy’, so that we can recreate that feeling without needing to go anywhere or do anything. It comes from within – it doesn’t need any kind of external prompt – so is entirely free and accessible to everyone. It’s definitely worth exploring.

If you recognise those feelings of anxiety and loneliness from the government survey, it’s clear you’re not alone. But we think these two suggestions – creating the feelings you want to feel and using your breath to give you more emotional control – might just help you start to turn things round.