2023-10-13 06:03:30
By Maite Sáenz, director of ORH.- We are a little lost with this well-being thing, don’t you think? Concepts dance with us and we tend to use terms as synonyms that may even carry a totally antagonistic hidden meaning. The bad thing is that if we also make decisions with this starting point we can end up in a beautiful garden, beautiful on the outside when it comes to planning it, but a tremendous labyrinth on the inside when it comes to managing it. That is what happens, specifically, with the well-being and health couple. I worry that we believe they mean the same thing and that we can act on both in the same way. Common prose reduces them to a least common multiple when, in reality, both are prime numbers. Sometimes they add, sometimes they subtract, but they are never reduced to the same thing.
Let’s start at the beginning (and you know that for me the beginning is in the what). Since we talk so much about well-being, do we know what it means, what it consists of, how it is defined and how it is expressed? With health we have a little more clarity because we have medical indicators that, with more or less margin of error, tell us when a body and mind are healthy and when they are not. In addition, they warn us when we are going off track even before we have symptoms. But well-being… well-being is something else. And it’s not worth telling me that it has to do with that I don’t know what that we don’t know what it is but that we feel that it is… No, not because that is mental health, not well-being.
Well-being above all is a perception, it is the personal, unique and non-transferable feeling that we are comfortable: with life, with a moment, with a situation, with a team, with a person… Being comfortable, being well, is saying a lot. To enjoy well-being, each of us needs something different. Even the person who reduces it to an economic question, how much money does he need to consider that he has financial well-being? The same as you, me, the one who sets interest rates, the one who determines the interprofessional minimum wage or the one who gives me long teeth by showing off his new car on Instagram? No, there is no single measure of well-being. The RAE defines it as the “set of things necessary to live well” and also adds that it is “a comfortable or well-stocked life in terms of what leads to having a good time and with peace of mind.” What do you want me to tell you, with this lack of definition it is very difficult for me to make a list of well-being indicators broad enough to reflect the diversity with which it can be understood. And the diversity now is very diverse and very dispersed.
If it is already complex to promote occupational health in companies, promising well-being begins to have its risks, because we can encounter situations as paradoxical as adopting an organizational measure such as teleworking that wants to promote well-being through conciliation and that, in the long run, becomes a boomerang of added stress or postural and visual problems and, incidentally, another front for risk prevention departments and company medical services. Or that we promote sport to promote cardiovascular health and that we end with a peak of ILT on Mondays after rugby league (true case).
Well-being is largely subjective and, therefore, the more measured the promises to promote it, the better. It is not about putting the noose around our necks committing ourselves to giving what is not in our power to provide, but rather understanding that the equation of well-being is resolved by expanding, even if only a little, the margins of satisfaction and, or, or and/or tranquility of people.
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