The Summer of PERMA: a coping challenge for grief

A challenge built around PERMA

Before getting into the details, it helps to explain how this approach to coping came about. There are things that resonate here and things that don't, and that context matters.

What resonates:

Honest conversations about grief
Recognizing that life can be harsh, unjust, messy, painful, and just plain hard sometimes
Finding coping strategies that actually work in real life

What doesn't:

Forced positivity
Sentences that start with "at least"
Lines like "the only difference between a good day and a bad day is your attitude"
Misconceptions about how grief works

Given all that, people are sometimes surprised to hear that positive psychology has real value here. The assumption is that anyone committed to talking honestly about grief couldn't possibly embrace a field centered on positivity. That assumption usually comes from a narrow idea of what positive psychology actually studies — as if it were just self-help fluff claiming that thinking happy thoughts erases every problem. It isn't that.

Positive psychology doesn't pretend life isn't harsh, unjust, messy, painful, or generally difficult at times. It doesn't claim that attitude alone separates a good day from a bad one. What it does offer is a set of research-backed tools for coping even when life is simply life. And finding coping strategies that actually work is exactly the kind of thing worth paying attention to.

One well-studied idea from this field is PERMA, developed by Martin Seligman. Seligman proposed five dimensions of psychological well-being, and argued that attending to each one can strengthen a person's overall sense of happiness, meaning, and fulfillment.

The five areas he identified are Positive emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishment. There's a more detailed breakdown of each element here, along with further reading available through positive psychology resources online, and Seligman's own book on the subject, Flourish: a visionary new understanding of happiness and well-being.

Setting up the summer challenge

Before getting to that, a quick word on how coping is understood here. Coping with the loss itself matters — call that loss-oriented coping. So does coping in a broader sense — call that well-being coping. Grief researchers Stroebe and Schut captured this well when they described grief coping as a mix of loss-oriented work, restoration-oriented work, and simply stepping back sometimes.

The key point is that activities that don't look directly related to grief can still support how you cope with it. They can lift your overall well-being, give you needed breaks, and support the restoration side of things — which in turn makes the loss-oriented work more manageable. For a fuller explanation, there's a helpful piece on this balanced approach to coping here.

Now, the actual challenge.

Around Memorial Day, as the school year was winding down, a conversation turned to summer plans — goals, everyday tasks, and the usual mix of personal ups and downs, some grief-related and some not. Out of that conversation came a decision: commit to doing one thing each day that supports overall well-being. Just one thing, no matter how small.

Long-running challenges here have a track record of falling apart partway through — photo challenges, gratitude challenges, all of it. And yet the attempts keep happening, because a community of people trying alongside you is motivating, even when the follow-through is imperfect.

Even an ambitious daily goal that doesn't get met perfectly still results in doing a lot more of something good than before. Watching others take on the same challenge is energizing in itself. Coping was never about doing things flawlessly — it's about doing things at all. Sometimes that means something big. Often it means something small. And sometimes it means a half-hearted attempt at something tiny on a day when getting off the couch feels like the whole task — and that still counts as something to be proud of.

So here's the challenge: a summer built around PERMA (all caps optional, but undeniably more dramatic).

Starting now, the plan is to do one thing each day that feeds into one of the PERMA areas. Part of the challenge — and part of the appeal — is that PERMA looks different for everyone, so it takes some experimenting to find what fits. Updates will be shared on social media, along with an infographic to spark ideas. There's also a list of 100 small ways to boost joy worth checking out, plus a printable PERMA worksheet for brainstorming your own ideas and tracking them through the summer.

Missing a day here and there is expected — a perfect streak would be a genuine surprise — but the goal is worthwhile regardless, since something is always better than nothing. Sharing isn't required, but it's welcome. Posts can be tagged with #summerofPERMA on social media for anyone who wants to join in or follow along.

For anyone who wants to share the challenge, build in some accountability, or invite others to join, there's an image below made for exactly that — because a little public accountability, and a little community, can go a long way.