QUICK ANSWER
PERMA is Martin Seligman’s model of psychological flourishing, standing for Positive Emotions, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishment. Seligman proposed that these five elements, each independently pursued for its own sake, collectively constitute a full account of what human beings need to flourish. PERMA moves beyond happiness as a single feeling to describe the architecture of a life that goes well.
Table of Contents
What does it actually mean for a life to go well?
Not just to feel good in the moment, but to genuinely flourish as a human being over time?
This is the question Martin Seligman, founder of positive psychology and former president of the American Psychological Association, has spent decades trying to answer scientifically.
His answer, developed through research, clinical work, and philosophical reflection, is the PERMA model. Published in his 2011 book Flourish, PERMA proposes that well-being is not a single thing but a construct composed of five distinct elements, each of which people pursue for its own sake rather than as a means to some other end. Together, these five elements provide a comprehensive account of what human psychological flourishing requires.
PERMA is not a self-help philosophy. It is a scientifically grounded framework with specific empirical support for each element, practical applications across clinical psychology, education, military settings, and organisational contexts, and genuine implications for how individuals can build more flourishing lives.
P: Positive Emotions
The first element of PERMA is positive emotions, but Seligman’s conception goes beyond simply feeling good. Drawing on Barbara Fredrickson’s broaden-and-build theory, Seligman identifies positive emotions not as the goal of life but as one of several conditions that enable human flourishing. Positive emotions include joy, gratitude, serenity, interest, hope, pride, amusement, inspiration, awe, and love.
What makes positive emotions an element of flourishing rather than simply its indicator is their functional role. Fredrickson’s research shows that positive emotions broaden the scope of attention and cognition, enabling creative thinking, flexible problem solving, and social bonding. They also build psychological, physical, and social resources that persist long after the emotions themselves have passed. In this sense, positive emotions are investments in future well-being rather than simply current experiences.
Seligman distinguishes between the pleasant life, which focuses primarily on maximising positive emotions, and the full life, which integrates all five PERMA elements. Research supports the distinction: pursuing only positive emotions produces less sustained well-being than pursuing the full complement of flourishing elements. Positive emotions are necessary but not sufficient for a flourishing life.
RESEARCH NOTE: Positive Emotions and Flourishing
Fredrickson and Losada’s (2005) research proposed that a ratio of approximately three positive emotions to one negative emotion characterises flourishing individuals. While the specific mathematical model in this paper was later challenged and the ratio figure retracted due to mathematical errors, the core finding, that flourishing individuals experience significantly more positive than negative emotions in their daily lives, has proven robust across multiple replications and methodologies. The ratio is not the point; the direction of the finding is.
E: Engagement
Engagement refers to Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow: the state of complete absorption in an activity that matches your skill level to the challenge involved. In flow states, self-consciousness disappears, time distorts, and performance often reaches its peak. Csikszentmihalyi’s decades of research found that people report their highest positive affect not during passive leisure but during engaged, appropriately challenging activity.
Seligman includes engagement as a PERMA element because it is pursued for its own sake, not as a means to positive emotion or any other outcome. People seek absorbing activities because engagement itself is intrinsically valuable, not because it produces good feelings. In fact, in deep flow states, people often report not feeling much of anything consciously; the experience registers as meaningful and positive primarily in retrospect.
The practical implication is that building engagement into daily life requires identifying and pursuing activities that match your strengths to meaningful challenges. Psychologist Chris Peterson’s character strengths framework, developed with Seligman, identified 24 universal strengths that research found across cultures. Using your signature strengths in daily activities is one of the most evidence-supported pathways to engagement and well-being in the positive psychology literature.
R: Relationships
Relationships are the element of PERMA with the broadest and most consistent support across research traditions. Seligman argues that humans are fundamentally social animals and that positive relationships are not merely supportive of well-being but constitutive of it: without genuine positive connection to other people, flourishing is not possible regardless of how well the other elements are achieved.
Research by Diener and Seligman found that very happy people, those scoring in the top 10 percent of self-reported happiness measures, were distinguished from less happy people almost entirely by the quality and quantity of their social relationships. They were not more extraverted, more wealthy, or more accomplished. They had richer social lives, more warm close relationships, and spent more time with people they cared about.
The Harvard Study of Adult Development, tracking participants for over 80 years, found that relationship quality at midlife predicted late-life health, cognitive function, and happiness more reliably than any other factor measured. Waldinger summarised the findings by stating that good relationships keep people happier and healthier, and that it is the quality of the relationships, not the quantity, that matters most.
EXPERIENCE NOTE
Positive psychology practitioners applying PERMA in clinical settings consistently report that the R element is where most clients have the largest deficit and the most untapped potential. Many clients focus intensely on P (feeling better) and A (achieving more) while systematically underinvesting in relationships. When attention and energy shift toward relationship quality, the downstream effects on all other PERMA elements are often dramatic. Engagement deepens when shared with others. Meaning amplifies when connected to relationships. Even positive emotions intensify with social sharing.
M: Meaning
Meaning in Seligman’s framework involves belonging to and serving something larger than yourself. It can be found through religious faith, political commitment, family, professional contribution, artistic creation, or community involvement. What matters psychologically is not the specific source of meaning but the subjective experience of serving something beyond personal interest.
Research distinguishes between hedonic well-being, which involves feeling good, and eudaimonic well-being, which involves living meaningfully and fully. Philosopher Aristotle’s concept of eudaimonia, often translated as flourishing or living well, is the philosophical ancestor of PERMA’s M element. Research by Carol Ryff found that meaning was one of the strongest predictors of psychological well-being, distinct from positive affect: people can have low hedonic well-being and high meaning simultaneously, as often seen in demanding vocations like medicine, teaching, and caregiving.
Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy, developed from his experience surviving Nazi concentration camps, proposed that the primary human drive is not pleasure but the search for meaning. His clinical observations and subsequent psychological research suggest that people can endure significant suffering and adversity when they experience their circumstances as meaningful, while prosperity without meaning produces a specific form of existential emptiness.
A: Accomplishment
Accomplishment, or achievement, is the fifth PERMA element. Seligman includes it not because achieving things produces happiness, though it often does, but because people pursue mastery, competence, and accomplishment for their own sake, independent of whether they produce positive emotion, meaning, or any other outcome. Achievement is intrinsically motivated in a way that matters for flourishing.
Self-determination theory by Deci and Ryan identifies competence, the need to feel effective and capable, as one of three core psychological needs alongside autonomy and relatedness. Deprivation of the need for competence, the sense of being unable to master the challenges in your life, produces significant psychological distress. Satisfying it through genuine accomplishment contributes to well-being through multiple pathways.
PERMA’s inclusion of accomplishment as a distinct element separates it from frameworks that reduce well-being entirely to feeling good. You can pursue achievement even when the process is difficult, frustrating, and emotionally unpleasant, and research shows that people who do so report greater long-term well-being than those who avoid challenge in pursuit of immediate comfort.
KEY TAKEAWAY
PERMA is a research-grounded framework for understanding what human flourishing requires beyond simply feeling happy. Each element, Positive Emotions, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishment, is independently pursued for its own sake and contributes distinctly to overall well-being. The practical value of PERMA is diagnostic: identifying which elements are strong and which are underinvested in your life gives you a more precise map for building wellbeing than any single happiness tip can provide.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the most important element of PERMA?
Seligman does not rank the elements, and the research does not support a single universal hierarchy. Relationships (R) have the broadest empirical support across cultures and research traditions. However, the elements interact and reinforce each other: strengthening any one element tends to improve others. The most important element is likely whichever one is most deficient in your specific situation.
How does PERMA differ from Seligman’s earlier happiness model?
Seligman’s earlier Authentic Happiness model proposed that well-being consisted of positive emotion, engagement, and meaning. PERMA expanded this by adding relationships and accomplishment, and by shifting the central construct from happiness to flourishing. The shift was partly empirical and partly philosophical: Seligman concluded that positive emotion was not the goal of life but one component of a richer account of what it means to live well.
Can PERMA be measured?
Yes, the PERMA-Profiler, developed by Julie Butler and Margaret Kern, is a validated psychometric tool that measures each of the five elements through self-report questionnaires. It has been used in research across multiple countries and populations and provides a profile of relative strengths and deficits across PERMA elements.
Is PERMA applicable across cultures?
Research has tested PERMA across multiple cultural contexts and found that the five elements are recognisable across cultures, though their relative importance and typical sources vary. Relationships and meaning tend to be particularly universally salient, while accomplishment and positive emotions show more cultural variation in their expression and priority.
How do I apply PERMA in my own life?
The most straightforward application is diagnostic: rate each of the five elements in your current life on a scale of one to ten and identify which elements are most deficient. Then focus deliberately on building the deficient elements rather than strengthening those already working well. Common applications include scheduling activities specifically for engagement, investing in relationship depth rather than breadth, and identifying or revisiting a sense of purpose.
