Welcome to Flourishing
Flourishing is a public-facing platform that shares, explains, and helps distribute key insights from Harvard University's Human Flourishing Program. Our focus is on making rigorous scholarship easier to access—translating research on what it means to live well into clear summaries, practical frameworks, and research-backed tools you can explore and use.
As Prof. Tyler J. VanderWeele describes it, flourishing concerns "a state of living in which all aspects of a person's life are good." This site exists to support understanding of that framework and the evidence behind it.
Our Mission
Our mission is to promote and disseminate the Human Flourishing Program's research and its implications for individuals, communities, organizations, and public life. We provide research-informed resources organized around six interconnected domains of flourishing, with the goal of helping people engage thoughtfully with the evidence—what it suggests, how it's measured, and how it can be applied in real-world settings.
Rather than offering medical or mental health services, Flourishing functions as an educational and research translation hub: a place to learn, reflect, and access tools built from established scholarly work.
Research-Grounded Measures
To make the research more concrete and usable, we provide validated measures developed by researchers associated with the flourishing literature.
The Flourishing Measure is a 12-question survey designed to capture flourishing across six domains.
The Meaning Measure offers a deeper look at how meaning is experienced and sustained.
These instruments draw on psychological and philosophical frameworks and were developed to reflect more than momentary mood—supporting research, reflection, and learning across time.
Practices and Applications
Research is most valuable when people can do something with it. In our Exercises section, you'll find structured activities that connect to flourishing scholarship and are grouped into four categories:
Cognitive
reflection & inquiry
Behavioral
action & habits
Relational
connection & community
Psychological
processing & resilience
Activities such as Gratitude, Savoring, and imagining your Best Possible Self are offered as research-informed prompts for reflection and growth. Other exercises focus on habits, relationships, and constructive ways of working with difficult experiences—presented as educational practices, not clinical treatment.
Expanding Access
We're exploring additional formats and distribution channels—including a mobile experience—so more people can access these research-informed resources in everyday life. Any future tools are intended to support learning, reflection, and practice based on the flourishing literature, with an emphasis on accessibility and evidence-informed design.
Learn More About Our Roots
Flourishing is inspired by the work of Harvard University's Human Flourishing Program, an interdisciplinary research initiative spanning philosophy, psychology, public health, and related fields. The program's scholarship has shaped the framework, measures, and resources highlighted on this site.
If you'd like to go deeper, we encourage you to visit the program's official website for scholarly articles, lectures, and academic resources that provide the full research context behind the ideas presented here.
Visit Harvard's Human Flourishing Program