By Measuring Well-Being and Reflecting on the Meaning of Life, We Can Change Both Ourselves and the World Around Us

Are you eager to learn about people and their concerns and emotions? Would you like to know how to approach and measure a person's well-being in a science-based way? Are you ready to find solutions in the future to help people live healthier lives and prevent premature illness? Come and learn new valuable knowledge that contributes to your current speciality, and with relevant knowledge and experience it is possible to influence the individuals and health situation in your community through health promotion processes and team leadership.

Well-Being and Health Behaviour, M.A. homepage

This is the specialty of our curriculum, for example, I don't know of any other existing curricula that have tried to bring together different kinds of important knowledge about well-being – how to measure it, what well-being looks like at different ages, from the point of view of the environment, social policy, epistemology, that is, how health research is also done In Estonia. Since the curriculum is in English, we also have foreign students, and we have tried to convey the Estonian experience to them. They participate through internships in the forward-thinking companies that consider employee well-being important. Therefore, they see how such socio-political and psychological support works in Estonia, how they try to increase people's well-being.

The range of curriculum topics is quite wide and the facilitators are very good in their fields, for example Kristjan Port on the topic of work ability, the connection between sports and well-being, Piret Vacht on environmental topics, Kaja Mädamürk on data analysis competence, Margus Ott in philosophy. In addition, Kenn Konstabel with knowledge of measuring well-being, exploring how to carry out this measurement. Mare Pork, who is an introducer of happiness concepts, talks about the psychology of happiness.

We have covered all important topics, Astra Schults talks about children's well-being, for example at school. Tiina Tambaum and Merike Sisask describe life span topics, also based on the well-being of the elderly. Also Vladimir Tomberg, who deals with information technology and behavior modification, creating apps that can influence people's behavior. Among the staff is Mariann Märtsin, who teaches an elective course on qualitative methods, dealing with softer methods of analysis.

As an innovation, we will introduce the cognitive empathy course in English in the fall. It is conducted by junior researcher Eliis Härma and associate professor Elina Malleus-Kotšegarov, both of whom have counseling psychotherapy skills and who create states based on the group technique of cognitive empathy and then step by step provide skills to perceive other people's motives and emotions.

Also completely new is Ivan Strigin and the existential psychology approach to well-being. Existential here means such a question of the meaning of life, the way to reach this answer. How to answer important questions, but this approach also therapeutically helps people understand the meanings of their emotions. This is one of those things that Ivan is very good at, because his training is in the field of existential physiotherapy counseling. In the spring, the "Meaning of life" course is coming, which brings together questions about the meaning of life.

These are new additions to how the participants themselves can increase their own well-being, and I think that's innovative in itself. As you know, university courses do not have to provide practical skills, that is, they rather provide systemic meanings to certain things, knowledge. Most university courses are not designed to increase any skills. People have, for example, emotional intelligence, social intelligence, in this sense we are moving in an innovative way to the place where the people of this curriculum also get something for themselves, get something extra in real life, as their own experience. Ivan Strigin's course is also directly aimed at the individual, i.e. the person himself. Thus, a compromise has been found both with things necessary for practical everyday life and with such abstract and theoretical topics.

I think it moves in sync with other trends in the world, where the meaning of universities is becoming more about not only imparting knowledge but also imparting skills based on such knowledge. We have placed very different dimensions of the meaning of this well-being in the curriculum. Several more separate curricula could be developed from these buds, but an assortment of everything is given here. What else does this being and existence itself mean? An axiom of existential psychology says that a person has three areas of being. One is me and the world, which then means that how I relate to the world, how I am in this world, which is mostly meant from the point of view of the environment, any social, physical space. Then me and myself, i.e. how can I handle myself. Perhaps this understanding is also important, which says that a person is not perfect. We all have endless contradictions and problems of some kind, and it requires certain skills or understandings to deal with them. And the third form of being is me and other people. In other words, the question of how I am in relationships. How to get support? How to support others? What ethical values do we have? After all, these three forms of being are the ones from which many things are built and function without us noticing it ourselves, and each of these areas has its own ways of understanding it.

If you look at the university level, the university still remains a place for imparting such abstract knowledge. We also need certain ways of knowing all this. That is why our curriculum does not give a master's degree if no empirical research has been carried out by the student. It is not possible to write only an essay about what I think about myself. Whether we actually get to the point of understanding the meaning of life, but the question of human adaptability and also society's ability to cope are still stuck between people's ears. It is quite difficult to understand the course of things in yourself and in society, if you do not know how to step aside, look at yourself from the side. This role of an observer is the essence of university education, university education gives the opportunity to start analyzing oneself and society in a way that does not contain these stereotypes of oneself. People tend to immediately know who is to blame and why everything is bad and unnoticed. However, all of his explanations are inherently inadequate because he only picks out those things that confirm his fears and suspicions. And so it is with well-being. Well-being does not mean that there will be lots of happy big cash flows or that there will be no war. Well-being is rather the ability to understand, both in war and in crises, which are the most valuable goals of being human, and if you don't want to understand it, then things will remain unfinished or broken, as we see around us now.