This is optimal living daily episode 1392. How meaningful is your life by Christine kloosterman of Christian Guzmán.com and I'm just a moloch. Welcome back to Optimal living daily also known as the oold podcast where I read to you from some of the best blogs. I can find and get permission from covering self-help minimalism productivity anything that I think is worth your time before we get to it investing can be hard and confusing especially with ticker symbols and charts flying back and forth on business channels like it's Runway at LAX, but why should something so important to your family's future be left up to the talking heads on CNBC enter the Molly fool to give you straight talk without the fancy. Jargon and noise or used to their Flagship service stock advisor gives you two brand new stock recommendations every month with daily analysis and coverage coming directly to your inbox daily. So what are you waiting for go to www.fewdoit.com Optimal living daily to learn more and claim an exclusive discount only for listeners. Browse get right to it and start optimizing your life. How meaningful is your life by Christine kloosterman of Christine Clues men.com human beings are hard-wired to seek meaning in our lives. It's something we all Crave in urine for and research shows that having high levels of meaning in our lives is correlated with high levels of well-being as well. A perceived lack of meaning often is at the root of most depressive disorders and is in fact, one of the primary diagnostic questions trained Health practitioners asked to help determine if someone is suffering from depression a modern paradox, Research shows that most people write their lives as very full of meaning as rates of depression anxiety and social isolation are at an all-time high in our culture. Something doesn't quite add up about this in our research lab. We are questioning whether most people's lives are truly filled with an abundance of meaning or whether we might just be saying that our lives are full of meaning due to social conditioning and or wishful thinking we suspect that social bias is more often responsible for people reporting and or believing their lies are full of meaning when in fact people may find their jobs friendships romantic relationships and other major categories in their life sorely lacking in meaning our studies are currently examining this issue. What's the question one of the major challenges with studying meaning in the way we are used to thinking about meaning in our own lives is that we typically posed the question in a very broad simplistic way is your life meaningful. So the answer is a brutal yes or no. We don't believe that this Mary breakdown is a very useful barometer. However, because it's to Global requires a snap judgment and invites us to answer in the more socially acceptable affirmative. Yes, of course my life has meaning to admit otherwise my forces to confront a very different and possibly depressing reality than we like to believe a yes or no answer also misses the nuances of everyday life in which we Source meaning from many different areas in our life in any given hour on any given day. We can experience meaning at different levels, depending Going on our activities assessing meaning in your own lives because of the relationship of meaning to well-being and the relationship between the lack of meaning and depression. It is critically important to take stock of your life in this regard honestly assess which parts of your life feel full of meaning in which do not even if you think your life is already full of meaning specifically identifying your areas of strengths and weakness can help you sharpen your appreciation for the meaning that is there as well as the Meaning and areas. You hadn't thought were rewarding area by area. We believe that in assessing meaning it is best to consider each of the major areas of your life separately rather than trying to do a global assessment the breakdown of major areas might vary from person to person but for many of us, it might include romantic partnership family work social and spiritual using a 10 point scale where 1 is utterly meaningless and 10 is the most meaningful things you've ever Experienced rate each of these major areas of life in terms of how meaningful they feel to you. Be honest with yourself. Does your work feel meaningful to your interactions with your kids feel meaningful. Are you more often than not just going through the motions in a particular area? Keep in mind. No one should expect that all areas of life will be at maximum meaning it's usually the case that some areas of our life enjoy the benefit of more attention and nurturing and the others feel less meaningful, but honestly taking stock is a critical first step. The 24-hour inventory a great next step for assessing meaning is to conduct a 24-hour experiment where for one day you focus hour to hour or as often as you change activity on the level of meaning you are experiencing noting down each time what you're doing and how meaningful it feels make sure you document your impressions keeping a list of all the things that struck you as meaningful and meaningless is the best way to remember gain true awareness and begin to discover patterns. You're phone can make this easy use your note feature to keep the list always at hand with unlimited space to add more entries as they occur. You will likely be surprised at some of the things that end up on your list. Our brains are primed to remember threats disappointments frustration and negative stimuli of any kind far better than the meaningful moments. So creating a list of the meaningful activities always seems to surprise and Delight even for the Skeptics. I was certainly surprised by the many things that listed is Meaningful such as talking in my boys at night. In the birds visit the bird feeder hearing Clair de Lune come on the radio feeding a stray dog and her puppy a can of dog food sitting down to read my latest favorite fiction book and learning a new recipe for my sister over the phone. I discovered that I was Finding meaning mostly in the tiny simplest moments of the day that I would never normally have noticed or predicted. I also notice the irony that the things that felt the most meaningful to me. We're also the things I tended to rush through the things I tended to deprioritize this exercise also helped me discover. That driving is totally meaningless to me and that I spent a ton of time doing it. I realized I chatting with acquaintances before and after-school pickup felt empty to me rather than worthwhile. I went to lunch with a friend. It was surprised to record that this interaction depleted me after some reflection. I realized this was typical for my encounters for that particular person back home with my family. I noticed we're all doing our own thing around the house without anything particularly meaningful happening my results from this experiment in Me to take action deleting meaningless and avoidable activities from my routine and for the activities that are unavoidable taking on the challenge of cultivating meaning they're scanning your activities behaviors and environment for areas of meaningfulness or meaninglessness is not about berating or discounting your life yourself or the people in it. It's about becoming more curious about what you value as meaningful and more familiar with the kinds of things that move your needle or make your heart leap. And the kinds of things that leave you flat these discoveries are tremendous opportunities to optimize our lives and connect more deeply to the things we care about the most for only when we realize something can we do something about it? 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So what are you waiting for go to www.fewdoit.com / optimal living daily to learn more and claim. An exclusive discount only for listeners and a big thanks to Christine. I'm a huge fan of these short life experiments like tracking what you're doing for an entire day and rating how meaningful each of those activities is. They'll definitely be enlightening reminds me of how I would track my mood every single day and write down what I did that day next to it. I know I found value in that and kind of goes hand-in-hand with this experiment. Definitely. Let me know if you try it out and how it goes. I'll leave it at that. Hope you're having a great day. Thank you for being here and listening to me and for subscribing. Going to the show. I'll be back tomorrow reading to you. So I'll see you there where your optimal life awaits.
Kristine Klussman asks how meaningful is your life. Episode 1392: How Meaningful Is Your Life? by Kristine Klussman on How to Find Meaning and Passion in Life Kristine Klussman specialized in Health Psychology (Behavioral Medicine) at Harvard Medical School, then founded and ran the Health Psychology program and post-doctoral training programs at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco. She found her work with cancer and cardiac patients inspiring, uplifting, and humbling. She found so many of those going through life-threatening illness were - sometimes for the first time in their lives - absolutely clear what truly mattered to them: authenticity and connection. In 2016, she founded a non-profit to focus full-time on trying to understand, explain and teach what she now believes is the single most meaningful and rewarding aspect of our existence. The original post is located here: https://www.kristineklussman.com/how-meaningful-is-your-life/ Please Rate & Review the Show! Facebook Group and Join the Ol' Family to get your Free Gifts! 