Relationships
4 Ways to Get From Healthy to Flourishing
Manage stress in small doses, nurture relationships, and find compassion and meaning.
Posted November 27, 2025 Reviewed by Devon Frye
Key points
- Flourishing is a state of meaning and purpose, mental and physical health, happiness and life satisfaction.
- To flourish, one needs to cultivate positive social relationships and connection to community.
- Engaging in the 7 domains of integrative health will help you be resilient and flourish.
- Small doses of stress reduction after difficult periods can help you recharge, stay resilient, and flourish.
The word flourishing, from the Latin “to grow” and French “to bloom,” brings to mind an overflowing cornucopia. That would be the ideal life to strive for—one filled with nourishing food, warm, loving relationships, connection to community, nurturing environments, happiness, meaning, and purpose.
The concept originated as far back as Aristotle’s “eudaemonia”—eu: good health, and daemon: true self, which encompasses physical, mental, and social well-being. Generally, flourishing includes meaning and purpose, mental and physical health, happiness and life satisfaction, close social relationships, character and virtue, and financial and material stability.
One can think of health as a continuum from lack of illness to physical health to emotional well-being to social well-being to flourishing. Each step is a signpost on the road to flourishing. Each is a state of being, not a way to get there.
So how does one get there? What are the actions one needs to take to move along this road?
Some of the elements that contribute to flourishing are also core areas of integrative health. The Andrew Weill Center for Integrative Medicine has defined seven domains of integrative health: sleep, resilience, environment, movement, relationships, spirituality, and nutrition.
Of those, relationships and spirituality clearly fall within the bounds of flourishing. Others—sleep, movement, nutrition—are necessary for physical and physiological health, without which one cannot flourish.
An adequate environment is needed to support both physical health (through, for example, clean air) and emotional well-being (through green environments). Resilience—how quickly one bounces back from any stressor—can be viewed as another signpost on the way to flourishing, sitting between social well-being and flourishing. Intentionally engaging in these core areas provides doable actions that help you get to flourishing.
Researcher Tyler VanderWeele proposed that flourishing means that all aspects of a person’s life are good. If this seems a dauntingly high standard to strive for, lowering the bar may help. Try first getting to resilience.
You can start with some simple stress-reducing activities, sprinkled throughout your day, to help balance stressful periods with short periods of relaxation. Allowing your brain’s stress response a little time to recover after a stressful period will help recharge your stress response by kicking in the relaxation response.
You can do this with a short mindfulness break, a brief walk in nature, a few deep breaths, a short nap, even just a brief time going offline, literally and figuratively, and gazing out the window, or at a favorite picture or piece of art.
Countering each stressor with these interventions in small doses can help reduce the load of stress on your body and immune system. How do you know when to engage in such activities? Your body will tell you.
For example, when I’m pushing on a deadline, I have the tendency to keep on pushing towards the end goal. It takes some effort, but when I start feeling tired, or my heart beating fast, or I start making errors, I know it’s time to stop, take a walk, take a nap, sit quietly, and only then get back to the project.
You can also use a wearable health tracker to remind you when to take a break. Mine indicates daytime stress and helps me take breaks after particularly stressful periods.
Athletes know that overtraining will result in failure or even illness, so training periods need to be balanced by breaks and relaxation. So, maintaining resilience by balancing stressful periods with relaxation is a starting point for flourishing.
On a longer-term basis, positive relationships are essential for health, well-being, resilience, and flourishing. Sheldon Cohen and Bruce Rabin’s classic studies showed that people with more positive relationships were less prone to frequent viral infections, while people who were chronically stressed were prone to more frequent and severe viral infections. At a physiological level, holding hands with a loved one has been shown to lower heart rate and blood pressure and enhance heart rate variability—a measure of reduced stress and enhanced relaxation response.
Connection to the larger community is also needed to go beyond well-being and resilience towards flourishing. According to Former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, we are in an epidemic of loneliness. Too many of us are isolated, connected to others only through virtual means, which tend to be draining, rather than sustaining. Intentionally making time for in-person relationships, at work or in your community, whether simply for a cup of tea or coffee and an afternoon chat, can help counter loneliness and burnout and move you farther along the continuum towards flourishing.
And then there is meaning. How do you find meaning? How do you find a connection to a larger purpose in life? Viktor Frankl’s all-time best-selling book Finding Meaning proposed that love is an essential element in finding meaning. Love of others, love of family, and altruistic love are all paths to finding meaning and flourishing.
The Dalai Lama’s philosophy of compassion and happiness fits well with this element of flourishing. Compassion can help you flourish and also find meaning. In his recent book Pure Unlimited Love: Science and the Seven Paths to Inner Peace, for which the Dalai Lama wrote the foreword, Stephen Post outlined seven different kinds of love that can help one flourish.
When I moderated a panel with the Dalai Lama and asked him if he uses meditation to reduce stress, he shook his head no—stress is not a word in the Buddhist tradition. When I asked what he uses meditation for, he said simply, love—compassion.
So, while there are many activities to help you get to flourishing, simple stress reduction activities shortly after stressful periods during the day, engaging in positive relationships and community, love and compassion, and meaning can help you on the road from health to resilience and flourishing!
References
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