Life Topic: Embracing & enjoying life

Do you channel your vitality, enthusiasm, and capacity to find joy and presence in everyday experiences, without being burdened by overthinking?

About this Life Topic

You went on holiday. Somewhere around day three, on a terrace with a view you had genuinely been looking forward to, you caught yourself checking your phone scanning for work related messages.

Or: you are having a home cooked meal, you took effort in picking the best ingredients, cooked it to perfection and now you are sitting at the table with your partner, and you notice that you should feel how nice this is, but you can't feel anything.

This topic is not really about happiness, which is why the word "enjoying" can mislead. It is about capacity. Specifically, whether you can be present or aware enough at this moment and register how you feel, rather than passing through every moment unnoticed.

The phrase "without being burdened by overthinking" is doing serious work in the definition. For most people the obstacle is not a shortage of good moments. It is being somewhere else in their minds while they happen: reviewing, planning, narrating, checking whether everyone else is having a nice time.

Not being present or being able to enjoy life zaps your energy. You notice you are not as vibrant or vital as you know you could be. Physically there is nothing wrong. The energy simply is not flowing.

You see it in small ways. “No or I'll do it later” is more common than “Yes, and "love too”. It's not that you don't want too your lacking a certain fire or spark you used to have.

If you do have this Life Topic at maximum you are able to do what you want and need to do and enjoy the moment it happens. You are present most of the day and you feel a certain life vitality.

What this Life Topic measures

This topic measures available vitality and enthusiasm, and the capacity to find joy and presence in everyday experience.

It reads enjoyment as a capacity rather than a mood, which is why it does not simply track whether you had a good week.

Behind the percentage

During a scan, Kalmoa's brain analysis records your brain's activity as a pattern of peaks and troughs, much like the kind you can find in an EEG, Kalmoa recognizes which of the seven life topics each part of that pattern belongs to.

Every relevant peak and trough is given a value and a weight, and those weighted values are added up into one number per Life Topic. We call this the Well-Being Index (WBI).

What the research says

Barbara Fredrickson's broaden-and-build theory (American Psychologist, 2001) proposed something that sounds obvious and is not: positive emotions are not merely pleasant outcomes, they are functional. They widen attention and behavior in the moment, and that widening builds durable resources, social, cognitive, physical, over time. Enjoyment, in that framing, is not the reward for a good life. It is part of the machinery that makes one.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's work on flow describes the state where absorption is complete and self-consciousness drops away: challenge and skill in balance, attention fully occupied. Most people's best moments, on examination, turn out to have this shape.

Fred Bryant and Joseph Veroff's research on savoring (2007) adds the practical corollary. Attending to and prolonging a positive experience is a distinct skill, separate from having the experience at all, and people differ enormously in how much of it they do.

Reading your score

A low score [XX–XX%] often signals depletion rather than unhappiness. When capacity is low, enjoyment tends to go first, because presence takes energy. Compare it with Stability and with Load Bearing before drawing conclusions.

A middle score [XX–XX%] frequently means enjoyment has become conditional: available on holiday, at weekends, once the thing is finished.

A high score [XX–XX%] means vitality is available to you in ordinary circumstances, not only in exceptional ones. This tends to be visible to other people before it is visible to you.

Drie smartphones met een dashboard-app, tonen werkstatistieken en prestaties in grafische vorm.

Why this Life Topic is worth following over time

This topic works as an early indicator. Enjoyment often dims several weeks before stress becomes obvious, so a downward trend here is worth noticing while everything still feels manageable.

Followed across a season, it also shows something more cheerful: what actually restores you, as opposed to what you assume should.

Curious to see how you are enjoying life?