Art-of-living: Validation of a novel concept to enhance one’s well-being

Abstract

Background: Positive Psychology (PP) explores the question of how to lead a fulfilled life with the overarching goal of increasing the general population’s well-being. Established PP approaches focus on individual characteristics such as personality attitudes and traits. A relatively new focus of well-being research that was inspired by ancient Greek philosophy, art-of-living, additionally focuses on the behavior of individuals with high well-being. Art-of-living is a holistic model of self-care strategies that address several areas (body, mind, and soul) and can be integrated into everyday life. The current paper will test the convergent and incremental validity of the art-of-living construct and investigate its potential use for PP research. To do so, we assessed the relationship of art-of-living with both well-being and two well-established concepts shown to promote well-being: happiness orientation as well as character strengths and virtues. In addition, we examined whether the art-of-living concept has added value in terms of predicting well-being as well as how it relates to other interrelated constructs. In doing so, we assume that art-of-living behaviors function as a mediator between global attitudes, character strengths, and well-being. We conducted an online survey with 636 participants from German speaking countries. Our results suggest that art-of-living is a valuable concept worthy of further attention in PP research