Skip to main Communities My dashboard Log in Sign up Published April 18, 2026 | Version v1 Preprint Open Rethinking Flourishing and Languishing: A Yin–Yang Interpretation of Well-Being Systems Authors/Creators Centre for Wellbeing and Flourishing Abrahams, Sean Description The relationship between flourishing and languishing remains under-theorised within well-being science. Although positive psychology has provided increasingly sophisticated accounts of flourishing, and related work has established languishing as a meaningful condition of diminished functioning, these constructs are still frequently interpreted through an oppositional logic. Recent developments, including the NARMA model of languishing and emerging evidence that flourishing and languishing may co-occur, suggest that this framing is no longer sufficient. This paper advances a relational and dynamic interpretation of well-being by bringing the Chinese philosophical concept of Yin–Yang into dialogue with PERMA, NARMA, TURN, and the process of inversing. Rather than treating flourishing and languishing as opposing states or merely as positions along a continuum, the paper argues that they are better understood as dynamically interrelated processes within a circulating system of human functioning. Drawing on work in dialectical cognition, affective co-activation, character strengths imbalance, and existential positive psychology, the analysis shows how coexistence, tension, and transformation can be interpreted without reducing one process to the absence of the other. Within this framework, flourishing is reconceptualised as a regulatory capacity: the ability to engage with, navigate, and transform the dynamic tensions that constitute psychological life. The paper concludes by outlining implications for theory, measurement, and intervention, arguing for a shift from static or unidimensional models toward approaches capable of capturing oscillation, co-activation, and adaptive regulation over time. Files Rethinking Flourishing and Languishing.pdf Files (347.4 kB) Name Size Download all Rethinking Flourishing and Languishing.pdf md5:c7d8c16ba83328ce285daf501b8dcfae 347.4 kB Preview Download 75 Views 44 Downloads Show more details All versions This version Views Total views 75 75 Downloads Total downloads 44 44 Data volume Total data volume 18.8 MB 18.8 MB More info on how stats are collected.... Versions External resources Indexed in OpenAIRE Communities Details DOI DOI Badge DOI 10.5281/zenodo.19646096 Markdown [](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19646096) reStructuredText .. image:: https://zenodo.org/badge/DOI/10.5281/zenodo.19646096.svg :target: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19646096 HTML <a href="https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19646096"><img src="https://zenodo.org/badge/DOI/10.5281/zenodo.19646096.svg" alt="DOI"></a> Image URL https://zenodo.org/badge/DOI/10.5281/zenodo.19646096.svg Target URL https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19646096 Resource type Preprint Publisher Zenodo Rights License Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International The Creative Commons Attribution license allows re-distribution and re-use of a licensed work on the condition that the creator is appropriately credited. Read more Citation Export Technical metadata Created April 18, 2026 Modified April 18, 2026 Jump up About About Policies Infrastructure Principles Projects Roadmap Contact Blog Blog Support Help FAQ Developers REST API OAI-PMH Contribute GitHub Donate Funded by Powered by CERN Data Centre & InvenioRDM Status Privacy policy Cookie policy Terms of Use This site uses cookies. Find out more on how we use cookies Accept all cookies Accept only essential cookies