Most of us treat wellbeing as one big bucket. If something feels off, we reach for whatever tool is fashionable this year: a bit of stress management, a walk at lunchtime, a mindfulness video someone shared on WhatsApp. And when life doesn’t magically settle, we assume we’re doing it wrong.

The real issue isn’t effort — it’s the model.

Wellbeing isn’t one thing. It’s a combination of three very different forces that behave differently, drain you differently, and need different approaches. If you don’t understand those differences, you end up misdiagnosing your own life and applying the wrong fix.

That’s why a simple framework helps:
Wellness. Illness. And Hygiene Factors — what I now call Dissatisfiers.

Once you see these three clearly, wellbeing stops being vague and becomes something you can actually make sense of.

1. Wellness: The Growth Side of Life

Wellness is the part of your life that lifts you. It’s the stuff that helps you feel alive, connected, purposeful, or simply “more yourself.” It’s not about solving problems — it’s about building the parts of life that give you a sense of vitality.

Maybe you learn something new and that small stretch of effort gives you energy for the rest of the day. Maybe you have a proper conversation instead of a quick exchange of logistics. Or perhaps you do work that feels meaningful rather than purely transactional. Wellness is the upward force in your life — the one built through repeated actions, not one-off events.

But here’s the crucial point: wellness only works when the other two domains aren’t pulling the floor out from under you.

2. Illness: A Completely Different Pathway

Illness is the domain most people understand instinctively: something is wrong, something is malfunctioning, and something needs professional help. Physical illness, mental illness, burnout, depression, anxiety — anything that crosses into clinical territory belongs here.

The big misunderstanding is thinking that wellness can fix illness. It can’t. You can’t “mindful” your way out of major anxiety, and you can’t “breathe” your way out of a chemical imbalance. Illness needs medical expertise, proper support, diagnosis, care — the things professionals are trained to provide.

It’s not a weakness to recognise illness; it’s a strength. It’s the moment you use the right toolkit instead of hoping a wellness activity will create the miracle.

3. Dissatisfiers — the Hygiene Factors That Drag Us Down

This is the part almost everyone ignores. Dissatisfiers are the small, ongoing issues that don’t make your life any better when they’re fixed… but absolutely wreck your wellbeing when they’re not.

Think of a few examples.

At home, you might be living with a boiler that’s on its last legs. You can manage it for a while — restart it, fiddle with the timer, swear at it — but each breakdown chips away at your stress levels. Fixing it won’t make life amazing, but not fixing it quietly drains you.

At work, maybe you’re dealing with a messy process that creates twice as much stress as it should. The system works, technically, but it leaves friction everywhere. Nobody calls it “illness,” but it’s not wellness either. It’s the kind of issue that chips away at your bandwidth, your mood, and your ability to stay calm.

These things don’t get better through stress management or positive thinking. They require boring, practical action: repair, replace, reorganise, simplify. When dissatisfiers build up, wellness collapses because your brain is too busy firefighting.

This domain is where most people get stuck. They try to handle dissatisfiers with wellness tools — the equivalent of trying to fix a squeaky boiler by going for a jog. Nice idea, wrong toolkit.

How the Three Work Together

Think of the three domains as three different levers on a dashboard.

Illness pulls you down sharply.
Dissatisfiers pull you down slowly.
Wellness pulls you up — but only if the other two aren’t overwhelming you.

And this explains why life can feel inconsistent. One week you feel great. The next week you’re exhausted. Nothing “big” has changed — but perhaps the combination of small dissatisfiers has increased, or an illness has quietly moved up the scale.

You can be perfectly healthy and still feel terrible if you’re drowning in dissatisfiers.
You can have no dissatisfiers and still feel flat if you’re not building wellness.
And you can be investing in wellness but getting nowhere if illness is rising underneath it.

Once you know the difference, you stop seeing wellbeing as a mood and start seeing it as a system. That change alone helps people feel more in control.

Two Simple Examples — One at Work, One at Home

To make this real, imagine these two scenarios.

At work:
You’re constantly juggling tasks because your team’s system is a mess. You spend half your day searching for files, clarifying responsibilities, or fixing avoidable mistakes. Your stress levels rise. You try a breathing exercise on lunch breaks — and yes, it helps for ten minutes — but the dissatisfier remains.
Until the system is changed, your stress will always return.

At home:
Your evenings feel chaotic. Not because anything is wrong, but because you haven’t set up a predictable routine. You jump between chores, screens, and tidying, and by bedtime, you’re wired. Again, stress management helps for a moment, but the real fix is the dissatisfier: creating a simple flow to the evening.

In both cases, the stress isn’t an “illness” and it’s not solved by “wellness.”
It lives in the middle domain — the practical, often boring, life-admin zone.
The Dissatisfier Zone.

And that’s where the leverage is.

The Big Insight

Once you start seeing life through these three lenses, you stop wasting effort. You match the right problem to the right toolkit. Life becomes easier to understand and, more importantly, easier to improve.

This triumvirate is the foundation. Everything else — the sense-making framework, the three wellbeing horizons, the shift from WHAT to HOW — builds on top of it.

But this is where it starts:
Illness. Wellness. Dissatisfiers.
Get them in the right order, and wellbeing finally becomes something you can work with.