Well now--What humans need to flourish

Plug “wellness” into a search engine and you’ll get 405 million hits — and a lot of advice. Everyone, from genuine experts to click-bait writers, has an opinion about what’s good for us.

“There’s been a lot of ‘expert speak’ on the concept of what it means to be well,” says associate professor of psychology and of medicine Catherine Heaney, PhD, who is leading a team at Stanford that has been working to define and measure wellness. “What there has been less of,” ​Heaney​ says, “is going to ordinary people and trying to get a sense of what being well means to them.”