How we feel depends on what we pay attention to

Policymakers are increasingly focusing on wellbeing as a policy goal, leaning on wellbeing measures to aid their work. Paul Dolan writes that the existing frameworks fail to properly account for the fundamental mechanism that determines our wellbeing: what we attend to. Together with colleagues Kate Laffan and Laura Kudrna, he created the Welleye framework, which shows the role of attention in linking the objective circumstances of people’s lives to how they spend their time – and ultimately to how they feel.