Six factors, and what they produce together

Wellbeing is usually sold as a list of habits, where each item is presented as independently good for you and the reader is left to work out how they fit together. The six factors below are related to each other in a specific way, and the relationship between them is the part that changes what any single change is worth.

One factor sits underneath everything and sets what all of it costs you. Four factors are what your body and your days are actually made of. One factor surrounds all of them and decides how much of any of it is available to you in the first place. Emotional regulation sits on top as the product of the other six, which is why we read it as information rather than treating it as the target.

We evaluate across all six, we identify which ones carry the most weight in your particular case, and the order of the work follows from that. The six are unequal in every individual, so the evaluation exists to decide what comes first.

The six factors at a glance

• Emotional regulation · the read-out of all six
• Environment · everything you live inside, with five working sub-layers: sensory, natural, economic, cultural, systemic
• Sleep · when you sleep, and what you owe
• Nutrition · what you eat, and what it costs to make
• Movement · what you can reach, and what it takes
• Connection · who knows you, and who holds you
• How you are built · which sets the price of everything above

1 · How you are built

The factor underneath the others, since it filters and adapts to every other factor.

Every nervous system has its own thresholds for noise, light, transitions, recovery, and sustained attention, and knowing yours changes what counts as a reasonable day. Two people can complete the same schedule at completely different energy costs, which matters enormously when you are deciding what to ask of yourself, and it is the reason a plan built on someone else's baseline usually fails without either of you understanding why.

Neurodivergence is the clearest case of this. Murray, Lesser and Lawson described monotropism in 2005, meaning attention that runs deep across few interests rather than spread thinly across many, which accounts for a great deal of ordinary daily friction. Raymaker and colleagues produced the first empirical definition of autistic burnout in 2020, built from autistic people's own accounts. Hull and colleagues documented camouflaging in 2017, meaning the effort of presenting as non-autistic, along with the exhaustion and the delayed collapse that follow it, and Cage and Troxell-Whitman showed in 2019 that the reason a person camouflages matters as much as how much they do it. Botha and Frost applied minority stress to autistic adults in 2020, which moves the explanation for poor mental health away from the person and toward what surrounds them.

We work from this factor at the start rather than adjusting for it afterwards, which is why schedules, room design, pacing, and the amount of unstructured time in a program are set with the actual group in mind. Diagnosis is welcome but not required, since self-identification carries the same weight here.

Where the evidence stops. Most camouflaging research is self-report and cross-sectional, so it establishes that people who camouflage more report worse mental health while leaving the direction of that relationship open. Longitudinal work is only now appearing.

2 · Sleep

Sleep is where most other factors show their effects first, and where a change is often felt soonest.

Freeman and colleagues ran the OASIS trial in 2017, treating insomnia in students and finding reductions in paranoia and hallucinatory experiences, with the sleep improvement mediating the effect. That trial is the strongest evidence we have anywhere in this model that changing a lifestyle factor changes mental health, rather than the two simply travelling together. Baglioni's 2011 meta-analysis found that insomnia predicts the later onset of depression in people who were not depressed to begin with, and Wittmann's work on social jetlag describes what accumulates in the gap between your body's clock and the schedule imposed on you, which is a distinction that matters for anyone whose difficulty is timing rather than duration.

So we assess timing alongside quantity, and we look at what is producing the pattern, since sleep responds to light, movement, stress, food timing, and the state of your relationships.

3 · Nutrition

Nutrition is worked from your actual biology, meaning blood markers, digestion, sleep patterns, and your own preferences, including textures and anything else that matters to you. We also look at your relationship with food across your life, and at what a meal actually costs you to produce on an ordinary Tuesday, since a plan that ignores the preparation load rarely survives its first difficult week.

Jacka's SMILES trial in 2017 was the first randomised trial in which changing what people ate improved depressive symptoms, and Firth's 2019 meta-analysis pooled dietary interventions across randomised trials for depression and anxiety. Molendijk's 2018 analysis is the counterweight, finding weaker effects once study limitations are accounted for.

Where the evidence stops. Nutrition trials are hard to blind and often small, so effect sizes move considerably between meta-analyses, and microbiome findings remain largely mechanistic. Claims worth making stay at the level of overall diet quality rather than specific foods.

4 · Movement

Movement gives you information about your own system, and it changes sleep, mood, energy, and how much stress you can absorb before it costs you.

Noetel's 2024 network meta-analysis in the BMJ compared modalities and intensities of exercise for depression, and Schuch's 2018 prospective work found that physical activity protects against later onset. Chekroud's 2018 study of over a million adults found a curve rather than a straight line, since more exercise stops helping past a certain point and eventually reverses, which is the finding that makes load a clinical question rather than a motivational one. Cooney's Cochrane review is the conservative reading, where the effects shrink once only the highest quality trials are counted.

So we set training against what your recovery can currently support, and we build habits that fit your preferences and your week, because those are the ones that are most likely to stick.

5 · Connection

One factor, worked in two parts, relationships and community, since being known by one person and being held by a group repair different things.

Co-regulation between people is physiologically real, since another person's steadiness measurably changes your own. We look at family, friends, partners, and colleagues, at the quality of those connections, and at where they are missing, because an absence here usually shows up as effort somewhere else.

House, Landis and Umberson established in 1988 that social relationships function as a risk factor for mortality comparable to the ones medicine already acted on, and Holt-Lunstad's 2010 meta-analysis across 148 studies quantified the survival advantage that stronger relationships carry. Her 2015 work separates loneliness, social isolation, and living alone as distinct risks, which matters practically, since a person who is lonely inside a full house needs something different from a person who sees nobody. Berkman and Syme's Alameda County study in 1979 is where the whole field begins.

Small, intentional groups give a nervous system the duration and the safety it needs to update, which is why every group we run stays at a size where people know each other by name.

6 · Environment

One factor with five working sub-layers, and the part of the model where OmniBloom differs most from other frameworks of this kind.

Environment decides how much of the other factors is available to you at all. It is the reason two people receiving identical advice end up in completely different places, and it is the part that most wellbeing frameworks leave out, which quietly turns every failure into a personal one.

Sensory and physical. Berman, Jonides and Kaplan showed in 2008 that directed attention behaves as a depletable resource that certain environments restore. Basner's 2014 Lancet paper covers the health effects of noise, which is why a flat beside a main road is a clinical variable. Evans's 2006 work covers crowding, light, and housing quality together.

Natural. Bratman's 2019 synthesis in Science Advances links nature experience to mental health, Engemann's 2019 PNAS study found green space in childhood associated with lower psychiatric risk later, using Danish population data, and White's 2019 work identified a weekly threshold in nature associated with reported wellbeing.

Economic. Mani, Mullainathan, Shafir and Zhao measured directly in 2013 that financial scarcity consumes cognitive capacity, which is the finding that dismantles the discipline explanation for why advice fails people with less money. Ridley's 2020 work in Science examines poverty and mental illness as a two-way causal relationship.

Cultural and linguistic. Henrich, Heine and Norenzayan showed in 2010 that most psychological findings come from a narrow slice of humanity, which is a caveat that belongs in anything we publish. Clement's 2015 review covers stigma as a barrier to seeking help, which is directly relevant in the Romanian context.

Political and systemic. Marmot's Whitehall studies track health outcomes against position in a hierarchy, the WHO Commission on Social Determinants of Health set out in 2008 how conditions of daily life produce health inequity, and Patel's 2018 Lancet Commission documents what fragmented provision produces at scale.

Seeing this factor clearly shows what sits outside your control, which removes a great deal of unnecessary self-blame, and it shows exactly where your control does reach, which is where the work becomes possible.

Where the evidence stops. Environmental research is almost entirely observational, since nobody randomises people into poverty or noise. The strongest available designs are natural experiments and population registries, so the claims worth making describe consistent patterns rather than proven causes.

The read-out · emotional regulation

How steady you feel, how quickly you recover from a difficult hour, and how much a small thing costs you on a given day is the combined product of the six factors above.

Regulation techniques are taught in our programs because they work. Aldao, Nolen-Hoeksema and Schweizer's 2010 meta-analysis established which strategies carry the most weight across different difficulties, Gross and John distinguished reappraisal and suppression as habitual styles with different costs, Lieberman's 2007 work showed that putting a feeling into words changes the brain's response to it, and Kashdan, Barrett and McKnight found that having more precise words for internal states predicts better outcomes.

We treat regulation as the read-out rather than the target, since working on regulation while the six factors underneath stay unchanged produces gains that fade. When your regulation is poor, that is information about the factors rather than a verdict on your character.

Why treating them together

Every factor above has its own literature, and the claim OmniBloom rests on is a separate one, which is that addressing them together produces something that addressing them in sequence does not. That claim carries its own evidence.

Katon's TEAMcare trial, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2010, put a single care manager in charge of coordinating depression alongside diabetes and heart disease, and outcomes improved across all of them at once, which is the clearest counterexample to fragmented care that exists. Archer's 2012 Cochrane review pooled collaborative care for depression and anxiety across many trials and found benefits over usual care. Ngandu's FINGER trial in the Lancet in 2015 combined diet, exercise, cognitive training, and vascular monitoring, and improved cognitive outcomes where single-domain trials had repeatedly failed, which is the strongest available evidence that combination outperforms sequence. Marx and colleagues published clinical guidelines in 2023 for lifestyle-based care in major depression, which is psychiatry stating in its own voice that this belongs inside treatment.

Where the evidence stops. Multidomain trials cannot show which component did the work, since that is the price of combining them. The honest framing is that combination outperforms single-factor approaches while the mechanism inside the combination stays open.

What actually happens, in order

1 · The fit conversation

A conversation with no commitment attached, where you describe what is going on and we tell you whether what we run is a good match. Sometimes the answer is that another kind of support fits better.

2 · The evaluation

For programs and multidisciplinary work, the evaluation is completed under a unique code, so your answers sit under that code rather than under your name.

It covers all six factors, using validated instruments where they exist for each one. The evaluation is extended for a reason, since the six factors are unequal in any individual and the assessment is what decides the order of the work.

3 · The report discussion

You receive the findings in a conversation with the specialists and the Care Coordinator, rather than as a document to interpret alone. This is where the picture becomes shared, where you say which parts you recognise and which you do not, and where the order of the work is agreed.

4 · The work

Whatever you have joined, whether that is a year-long program, a course of individual sessions, or a retreat week. Throughout it the specialists stay in conversation about you, and the Care Coordinator holds the thread between them, so the coordination is our work rather than yours.

5 · The checkpoints

Longer programs re-evaluate at fixed points, so the plan responds to what has actually changed instead of continuing on its original assumptions. In OmniBloom Rituals these fall at four points across the year, and two of them include an explicit renegotiation of what you are working on.