Researchers Just Found the Key to Your Well-Being and It’s Not Money

For a lot of people, it’s actually about having more diverse neighbors.

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Your sense of well-being likely depends on a few specific characteristics about where you live—and it’s definitely not just about the money. It turns out that diverse neighborhoods, specifically those with more black residents, commuting by public transportation or bike, and having access to health care are all top factors associated with greater well-being, a new study finds.

Although self-reported, well-being—defined as “a person’s cognitive and affective evaluations of his or her life”—is one crucial way to measure the health of a community. Science shows that people with higher well-being levels live healthier, longer lives than people who report lower well-being. And while regional well-being is understood at a large scale, this study aims to explain exactly why some people are living better lives at the county-level. 

As part of a national Gallup-Sharecare poll, nearly 340,000 American adults, both English- and Spanish-speaking, answered questions about their lives—their standard of living, satisfaction with community, work, relationships, and personal health, to name a few—by telephone between 2010 and 2012.

Based on their answers, a team of scientists led by researchers from Yale and the University of Cincinnati, assigned each person a “well-being” score. Then, they compared Americans’ self-reported well-being levels to more than 70 different demographic, social-economic, medical, and physical environmental factors within their county, to measure which ones wielded the greatest influence on people’s life satisfaction. The results published Wednesday in the journal PLOS ONE. 

“The question in this study was whether we could actually find specific place-based attributes that are linked to well-being,” Brita Roy, an assistant professor of medicine at Yale’s School of Medicine and the lead author on the study, tells Mother Jones

In addition to living in diverse neighborhoods, access to public transportation, and health care, the group also found, perhaps expectedly, that areas with a greater percent of people with bachelor’s degrees and with higher household incomes report greater well-being; meanwhile, people report less well-being in places with high rates of divorce and child poverty. 

Just as interesting is what researchers found didn’t make a difference: The unemployment rate, crime rate, and the percent of people who commute by walking. Each of these factors had no statistically significant effect on people’s well-being. 

While the study doesn’t disclose which specific counties had the best and worst well-being scores, the most recent Gallup-Sharecare poll identifies the metropolitan area Fort Smith, Arkansas-Oklahoma as having the worst overall well-being, with places including Binghamton, New York, and Flint, Michigan, also coming in with some of the country’s lowest scores. On the other end, Naples-Immokalee-Marco Island, Boulder, Colorado, and Santa Cruz-Watsonville, California, are in the top five areas for overall well-being. 

“If a person has strong social support, they’re well-connected with friends and family…if they have access to basic needs—health care, healthy foods—they feel safe walking in their neighborhoods, and have basic physical functioning and mental health, with those resources, those people will thrive,” Roy says.  

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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