The Five Things You Need to Actually Thrive

In this episode of Get a Life, Jackie Oña Cascarano explores one of the most influential frameworks in positive psychology, the PERMA model of well-being, and how it can bring more vibrancy and richness to mid-life for high-achieving women looking to expand beyond productivity and caretaking.

Martin Seligman's PERMA model outlines the five science-backed dimensions of human flourishing: Positive Emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishment. While many high-achieving, ambitious women have built lives rich in meaning and accomplishment through professional and caregiving roles,  other dimensions - like positive emotion, engagement, and connection - become neglected, causing life to feel flat or depleted despite outward success.

Jackie shares how her Adventure Year, a personal commitment to intentionally pursuing hobbies, curiosity, and new experiences, is a real-time case study in mid-life flourishing. She walks through each dimension of PERMA and explores how small, intentional shifts can restore energy, deepen connection, and bring more texture, vitality and psychological richness to daily life.

If you're a woman in mid-life looking for practical, science-based tools to thrive, not just achieve, this episode offers a grounded roadmap to flourishing. 

References

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. Harper & Row.

Fredrickson, B. L. (2001). The role of positive emotions in positive psychology: The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. American Psychologist, 56(3), 218–226. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.56.3.218

Oishi, S., & Westgate, E. C. (2022). A psychologically rich life: Beyond happiness and meaning. Psychological Review, 129(2), 263–281. https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000317

Seligman, M. E. P. (2011). Flourish: A visionary new understanding of happiness and well-being. Free Press.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Get a Life. This is a podcast for women who feel the pull towards something more. Women ready to become the main characters of their own stories and build lives filled with interesting experiences, passionate pursuits, and adventures big and small. I'm Jackie Cascarano, former lawyer, turned women's wellness coach, and I'm a practitioner of positive psychology, the science of well-being. I help high-achieving women reconnect with themselves and create lives rich with authenticity, alignment, and agency. Welcome back to Get a Life. Last episode, we talked about adventure year and the idea that a psychologically rich life is filled with interesting and perspective-changing experiences. Today I want to zoom out and talk about something bigger and kind of foundational to what we are digging into in this podcast. I have devoted my professional life to helping high-achieving women flourish. But what does that actually mean? What does it mean to flourish? What actually makes a life good? There are several constructs and frameworks for understanding well-being within positive psychology, which is the empirical science of human well-being. But today I want to focus on probably the most influential of those frameworks, which is Martin Seligman's PERMA model. So that's an acronym, P-E-R-M-A. Marty Seligman is the founder of the field of positive psychology. He was the president of the American Psychological Association in the 80s. He's brilliant, very well respected, and he's also a lovely person, one of my professors in my graduate program. And he came up with the concept of PERMA. PERMA describes the five core dimensions of flourishing. And they are as follows P is for positive emotions, E is for engagement, R is for relationships, M is for meaning, and A is for accomplishment. We will go into great detail on all these dimensions shortly. None of these dimensions is more important than the other. That's a really important thing to emphasize. I don't want you thinking that one of them is the key to well-being. They work together, and the important thing is to identify if there is one that is particularly deficient or that you need to work on. When you feel like something is off in your life, like many women with whom I work do, perma is often a really great starting point. When we define what a life of flourishing really looks like, you can really see when you look at the ideal situation where you're flourishing, you're running on all cylinders in different areas of your life, you can really identify which areas are really deficient. So as we talk through these, think about how each one is reflected in your life. So the first one is positive emotion. This is the P for perma. And this is kind of just what it sounds like positive feelings, good vibes. This includes energizing emotions called high arousal feelings like excitement, amusement, pride, inspiration, enthusiasm, interest, curiosity, right? So these are all positive emotions. There are also calming emotions, right? Low arousal ones that are, for example, contentment, serenity, peacefulness, gratitude, love, especially the warm, kind of calm form of love versus the honeymoon period, like new boyfriend, passion love, which might be more high arousal. Satisfaction is another calming positive emotion. So these are good feels, pretty much. And they are important, okay? Not just because they feel good, because think for a moment, imagine a life where you don't feel positive emotions. Sounds pretty awful, right? So it is vital to create moments when you are able to experience joy, curiosity, or enthusiasm. They actually broaden our thinking and help us build psychological resources over time. And this is something Barbara Frederickson calls the broaden and build theory. And she's a professor out of the University of North Carolina. The second dimension is engagement. This is also known as flow or the optimal experience. And it's a concept developed by Mihai Chicksent Mihai. It's a mouthful. And he was one of the founders of positive psychology, along with Marty Seligman. Engagement happens when you are deeply absorbed in an activity. Time disappears, you lose track of yourself, you completely are immersed in what you're doing. You might have had this experience yourself. I'm not sporty, my friends, but a lot of people who are sporty get in the flow when they're playing a sport, when they are playing basketball or running. There are also many other ways to be in flow. If you are engaged in a lecture or you are writing, so many ways you can get into flow, dancing, so many ways. And it's an important experience to have in kind of all areas of your life. Work for sure, if you really want to enjoy what you're doing. And I think in the daily activities that take up much of your day, engagement in the form of flow supports intrinsic motivation, which we talked about in the first two episodes, by drawing us into activities that are interesting, challenging, and rewarding in their own right, right? We do we do them because they are rewarding in and of themselves rather than driven by external rewards or pressures. Interestingly, hobbies and creative pursuits and everyday adventures are some of the most common places where people experience flow. The next dimension is R for relationships. And this is something you probably are already familiar with. I mean, I think that we are having a moment, especially after COVID, where we really understand the human need for connection. Humans are deeply social creatures. Our well-beings are strongly tied to the quality of our relationships. Friends, family, partners, community, feeling seen, feeling supported, feeling like you belong. Connection is not just something that's nice to have, it's actually fundamental to flourishing. And a lot of the hobbies, adventures we talk about in this season are also powerful ways to build relationships with others because you are forcing yourself to, for example, play mahjong with three other people. M for meaning is the next dimension. And it is the sense that your life matters and contributes to something larger than yourself. Meaning often comes from serving, caring for others, or being a part of something beyond your own individual success. For myself and many others, we find meaning in our faith. And that's a really important component of meaning as well. If you find meaning in your work, that's also a wonderful way to get a lot of satisfaction and fulfillment out of your professional life. Many women actually have very high levels of meaning in their lives: parenting, caregiving, community involvement. These are deeply meaningful roles. And the challenge, I think, for many high-achieving women is not that the meaning is missing, it's that there's so much meaning tied to the responsibility and service to others, like we talked about before, the caretaking, the societal and patriarchal pressure to care for others, that there's often little space for other experiences that might nourish one's self. The next dimension is A for accomplishment. And this is a fun one. It is our human nature to set goals and work to achieve them. And I love talking about this particular dimension with high achieving women because we know we know this, we have internalized this. We are achievers, we love to accomplish things. Nothing gives me greater delight or satisfaction than writing a list and checking things off the list. And in fact, I will often write down things that I've already done just so I can check the box. It's just a thrilling experience. So accomplishment is that last dimension. So yes, human nature is to set goals and work to achieve them. And you think about marathons, for example. Like why do people do that? There's there, it makes no sense to me, right? There are so many different ways to exercise people. Why would you do that to yourself? It's because accomplishment and achievement is internal to us, it is a part of our makeup. High achieving women tend to do very well in this category, no surprise, perhaps to a fault, right? Many of us have built our identities on the ability to do so. But accomplishment absolutely contributes to well-being. It is something to foster in conjunction with the other dimensions. The problem arises when accomplishment becomes the primary way that we measure our worth. And that I think is very linked to societal pressure, patriarchal pressures on doing it all, being productive at all times. And also it points us to the questions, you know, what do I want out of my life versus what am I expected to do? What do my parents want for my life? What does my partner want for my life? Right. There's that onion where you're peeling away slowly but surely to get to the core of what you want. You peel away what is good for your kids, you peel away the expectations of your parents and your college friends, and you finally get to the core of what you want. Not that those other things don't factor in. Of course they do. Of course, it matters what's good for your kids and what's good for your husband. But it's also really important for you to have identified what you want. Sometimes we're so driven by the accomplishment drive, we forget to do that. One of the reasons I love pursuing hobbies and adventures and encouraging other women to do so is because everyday adventures matter so much, specifically with accomplishment. They give us a place to engage, to grow, to develop skills without tying our worth to performance or outcomes. So that's the five dimensions of perma. Do we feel like there's anything missing? Think about the whole person who's flourishing in their life. Positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning, accomplishment. Anything missing? Health. Yes, for sure. Later, Marty Seligman added health and physicality to the framework because it is so vital to our overall well-being. Physical health and movement are deeply intertwined with well-being. There's no doubt about it. When our bodies are functioning well, when we move regularly, sleep well, nourish ourselves, we have the energy and the capacity to pursue the other dimensions of flourishing, and we can really be our best selves. I know that I am not okay when I'm not sleeping well. That's like the number one thing I need to address usually. And physical vitality supports our ability to engage in life, to connect with others, pursue our goals, and experience positive emotions. So, in many ways, health becomes the foundation for all the other ones. Where things get out of balance, I believe, is that many high-achieving women have lives that are extremely high in meaning and accomplishment. But we sometimes neglect other parts of the well-being equation: engagement, relationships, for sure, positive emotions. When I was at the height of my productivity at all costs era, there was no way I was taking time to myself to prioritize creating positive emotions. That just was not, it was not on my calendar that day. And it showed. This is where we see the benefits of pursuing psychologically rich experiences. And this is why I'm pursuing adventure year. This is why I'm focused on this particular area for women's well-being. This is why I'm here to have this conversation. Experiences that are interesting, novel, perspective changing, everyday adventures, pursuing things that you're passionate about, these kinds of experiences create all of perma, right? Positive emotions, flow, you're connecting with others. You are setting goals for yourself within the activity. Like my cousin who's learning tennis, she is moving from one level to the next, and it's really fulfilling. So if your life is built entirely around achievement and responsibility, it can look really successful. A lot of women, they're running themselves ragged checking boxes on a to-do list. So you can look and you can even believe that your life has come to this phenomenal pinnacle of success. But is this what success is supposed to be? That's my question for you. And it's a hard question to think about and to answer because a lot of times you're feeling flat on the inside, numb because human flourishing is far more complex than productivity. We are meant to experience other things that light us up. Curiosity, play, creativity, exploration, personal growth, all of it. So I want to thank you for being here with me today. In the episodes ahead, we're going to explore different ways to bring these dimensions back into our lives through curiosity, hobbies, adventures, and everyday exploration. And as you leave this episode, I really want to invite you to reflect on which dimensions feel strong in your life right now and which ones may have been quietly or loudly neglected. And if this episode resonates, subscribe so you can join me for the next one. And if you have a friend who might enjoy these conversations about building a richer, more interesting life, send it her way. I'll see you next time.