About CBS Well-being Lab

At CBS Well-being Lab, we work with student well-being at business schools and beyond.

Our main aim is to understand the underlying issues concerning stress, anxiety and general well-being among students and to develop theories and practical measures that prevent unnecessary stress and improve well-being.

We believe that stress, anxiety and lack of well-being cannot be reduced to the responsibility of the individual, because they all have a common cause in the culture of our societies and in extension our educational institutions. In our research, well-being emerges as a relational phenomenon. Providing a solid and sustainable response therefore means caring for the collective field which requires a community effort.

Stress among students: a larger societal concern

A relational approach

Many universities adopt well-being frameworks with the primary aim to reduce discomfort, and introduce individualized tools like self-care apps, resilience training, and mindfulness programs. This response risks failing to prepare students for the emotional and ethical demands of the real-world businesses and overlooks the institutional culture around them. It focuses on how students are coping one by one – not how they are growing together.

In our approach, well-being is not the absence of distress, but the presence of ethical and relational capabilities: critical judgment, response-ability and generosity, embedded in supportive relationships with others. It is cultivated not by avoiding discomfort, but by learning to engage with it. We wish to call individual vulnerabilities to the forefront and reveal them for what they (also) are: shared human conditions. These cannot be removed – but they might be transformed.

Our approach to well-being is based on a 4-year long study at CBS, providing interviews as well as collaborative learning and creative exercises that was then processed through exploratory inquiry and problem analysis (read more on our analytical strategy here). The work lead to the creation of a host of tools for students and teachers to make use of as well as a manifest that sums up our findings and responses.