At the base of the hierarchy of health is the determination of your values and spirituality/philosophy. The underlying question is what’s important to you and how you view yourself and this existence. An even more fundamental question is, do you believe you’re worth it? In speaking with a fair amount of patients, there’s an increasing prevalence of chronic discontent. This can present due to a myriad of factors including envy, disappointment, burnout, and anxiety. This often comes when we are living a life discordant with what we would expect.
Just like following a standard workout program we can defer the answer to this question to follow the values of preset groups. If we are a member of a religious organization we can follow all of their tenets. We often default to the cultural norms of those which we spend the most time around. If all of your friends are heavy drinkers, it’s more likely that you are going to drink a lot. These values are not always negative. If you have a supportive group of people who are meeting around improving it can be beneficial for you. If your friends are intellectually curious, financially secure, physically fit, and care deeply about your wellbeing - you are incredibly lucky and found people that you should spend more time with.
There are multiple ways to determine your values and life philosophies. You likely have already inherited many of them from your parents, for better or worse. Ideally, you would have identified what you liked and didn’t like about your childhood experience and come up with solutions or actions that would improve the situation as it arises in the future. We can improve our perspective through books, life experiences, travel, jobs, conversations/asking questions, podcasts and hobbies.
When reading we are absorbing alternative life experiences and perspectives. Reading allows the reader to peek into the author’s mind. Reading biographies allows us to see the good and bad that comes from living life. Thought experiments asking ourselves what we would have done in a similar situation and the downstream effects of those decisions takes very little effort. Evaluating habits that led to other peoples’ success and implementing them in our own lives can accelerate our growth. Evaluating the timelines that lead to others’ success can be therapeutic in that it shows success and achievement are built over years and decades not hours and days. This reminder is important in providing perspective to our present day society built on instant gratification and instant results.
Seeking diverse perspectives can help expand our thinking. Finding parallel themes in multiple fields allows for the creation of mental models that we can expand to other areas of our life. Integral thinking is a term coined by Ken Wilber. Part of this philosophy is to explore a topic and pick the things that resonate with you. Do not accept all the dogma from a particular topic. Explore alternate perspectives and find what resonates with you. You do not have to conform to all the thinking of a larger group. If you conform to all, it may breed resentment and frustration.
All humans do things that are not consistent with who we want to be. Affording ourselves the grace to accept that we are imperfect, learn from these mistakes and grow from them is the real solution to past mistakes. Ruminating on past mistakes only hampers our ability to move on and make amends going forward. Feeling the pain of past mistakes provides feedback that we weren’t living a life consistent with what we value. Hopefully, we are blessed with additional opportunities to not make the same mistake again.
The goal from all of this experience and evaluation is to fine tune what type of person that we want to become. If we say we're a person who values being healthy it may mean not eating fast food on a frequent basis or drinking alcohol multiple nights per week. If we say we love our families it means giving and spending quality time with those that we love. If we say we’re a good friend we keep our promises and support our friends when they are going through challenging times. When we live a life that’s consistent with our values, self confidence grows, we can accept where we are at.
Expect to change. Over time we will accumulate life experience. At times this will solidify our currently held beliefs. Other times it will radically change our perspective on what we thought to be true. The goal is to step daily towards being the person you want to be.If we reach the point of living a life that’s in alignment with who we want that’s one of the greatest blessings we have.
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