Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life

 Ikigai The Japanese Secret To A Long And Happy Life

• “Fill your belly to 80 percent.” Ancient wisdom advises against eating until we are full. This is why Okinawans stop eating when they feel their stomachs reach 80 percent of their capacity, rather than overeating and wearing down their bodies with long digestive processes.

• Just as a lack of physical exercise has negative effects on our bodies and mood, a lack of mental exercise is bad for us because it causes our neurons and neural connections to deteriorate—and, as a result, reduces our ability to react to our surroundings.

• Our neurons start to age while we are still in our twenties. This process is slowed, however, by intellectual activity, curiosity, and a desire to learn. Dealing with new situations, learning something new every day, playing games, and interacting with other people seem to be essential antiaging strategies for the mind.

• Research into the causes of premature aging has shown that stress has a lot to do with it, because the body wears down much faster during periods of crisis.

• While sustained, intense stress is a known enemy of longevity and both mental and physical health, low levels of stress have been shown to be beneficial.

• Walk to work, or just go on a walk for at least twenty minutes each day.

• Use your feet instead of an elevator or escalator. This is good for your posture, your muscles, and your respiratory system, among other things.

• Participate in social or leisure activities so that you don’t spend too much time in front of the television.

• Get the right amount of sleep. Seven to nine hours is good, but any more than that makes us lethargic.

• Play with children or pets, or join a sports team. This not only strengthens the body but also stimulates the mind and boosts self-esteem.

• Science has shown that sleep is a key antiaging tool, because when we sleep we generate melatonin, a hormone that occurs naturally in our bodies.

• A positive attitude and a high degree of emotional awareness. In other words, those who face challenges with a positive outlook and are able to manage their emotions are already wellon their way toward longevity.

Fight for yourself

• Existential frustration arises when our life is without purpose, or when that purpose is skewed.

• Existential crisis, on the other hand, is typical of modern societies in which people do what they are told to do, or what others do, rather than what they want to do.

• Humor can help break negative cycles and reduce anxiety.

Morita therapy

• During the first week of treatment, the patient rests in a room without any external stimuli. No television, books, family, friends, or speaking. All the patient has is his thoughts.

• In this stage, the patient performs repetitive tasks in silence. One of these is keeping a diary about his thoughts and feelings. The patient goes outside after a week of being shut in, takes walks in nature, and does breathing exercises. He also starts doing simple activities, such as gardening, drawing, or painting. During this stage, the patient is still not allowed to talk to anyone, except the therapist.

• In this stage, the patient performs tasks that require physical movement. Dr. Morita liked to take his patients to the mountains to chop wood.

Going with the flow

• You are entirely focused on skiing as well as you can. You know exactly how to move at each moment. There is no future, no past. There is only the present.

• Flow is “the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.”

• When we flow, we are focused on a concrete task without any distractions.

Strategy 1: Choose a difficult task (but not too difficult!)

• Schaffer’s model encourages us to take on tasks that we have a chance of completing but that are slightly outside our comfort zone.

• If the rules for completing a task or achieving a purpose are too basic relative to our skill set, we will likely get bored.

• If, on the other hand, we assign ourselves a task that is too difficult, we won’t have the skills to complete it and will almost certainly give up—and feel frustrated, to boot.

• The ideal is to find a middle path, something aligned with our abilities but just a bit of a stretch, so we experience it as a challenge.

Strategy 2: Have a clear, concrete objective

• Having a clear objective is important in achieving flow, but we also have to know how to leave it behind when we get down to business. Once the journey has begun, we should keep this objective in mind without obsessing over it.

• When Olympic athletes compete for a gold medal, they can’t stop to think how pretty the medal is. They have to be present in the moment—they have to flow. If they lose focus for a second, thinking how proud they’ll be to show the medal to their parents, they’ll almost certainly commit an error at a critical moment and will not win the competition.

Strategy 3: Concentrate on a single task

• We often think that combining tasks will save us time, but scientific evidence shows that it has the opposite effect. Even those who claim to be good at multitasking are not very productive. In fact, they are some of the least productive people.

• When we say we’re multitasking, what we’re really doing is switching back and forth between tasks very quickly.

• Concentrating on one thing at a time may be the single most important factor in achieving flow.

• Don’t look at any kind of screen for the first hour you’re awake and the last hour before you go to sleep.

• Turn off your phone before you achieve flow. There is nothing more important than the task you have chosen to do during this time. If this seems too extreme, enable the “do not disturb” function so only the people closest to you can contact you in case of emergency.

• Read and respond to e-mail only once or twice per day. Define those times clearly and stick to them.

• Bundle routine tasks—such as sending out invoices, making phone calls, and so on—and do them all at once.

• Even Bill Gates washes the dishes every night. He says he enjoys it—that it helps him relax and clear his mind, and that he tries to do it a little better each day.

Instant vacations: Getting there through meditation

• If we want to get better at reaching a state of flow, meditation is an excellent antidote to our smartphones and their notifications constantly clamoring for our attention.

Humans as ritualistic beings

• When we have only a big goal in front of us, we might feel lost or overwhelmed by it; rituals help us by giving us the process, the substeps, on the path to achieving a goal. When confronted with a big goal, try to break it down into parts and then attack each part one by one.

• The happiest people are not the ones who achieve the most. They are the ones who spend more time than others in a state of flow.

Using flow to find your ikigai

• Write all of them on a piece of paper, then ask yourself these questions: What do the activities that drive you to flow have in common? Why do those activities drive you to flow? For example, are all the activities you most like doing ones that you practice alone or with other people? Do you flow more when doing things that require you to move your body or just to think?

• Flow is mysterious. It is like a muscle: the more you train it, the more you will flow, and the closer you will be to your ikigai.

Secrets To A long Life 

• “If you keep your mind and body busy, you’ll be around a long time.”

• Food won’t help you live longer, the secret is smiling and having a good time.

• The secret to a long life is not to worry. And to keep your heart young—don’t let it grow old. Open your heart to people with a nice smile on your face.

• The best way to avoid anxiety is to go out in the street and say hello to people.

So, eat less to live longer?

• If the body regularly consumes enough, or too many, calories, it gets lethargic and starts to wear down, expending significant energy on digestion alone.

• Another benefit of calorie restriction is that it reduces levels of IGF-1 (insulin-like growth factor 1) in the body. IGF-1 is a protein that plays a significant role in the aging process; it seems that one of the reasons humans and animals age is an excess of this protein in their blood.

• The 5:2 (or fasting) diet recommends two days of fasting (consuming fewer than five hundred calories) every week and eating normally on the other five days.

• Who live longest are not the ones who do the most exercise but rather the ones who move the most.

What is resilience?

• One thing that everyone with a clearly defined ikigai has in common is that they pursue their passion no matter what. They never give up, even when the cards seem stacked against them or they face one hurdle after another.

What’s the worst thing that could happen?

• We finally land our dream job, but after a little while we are already hunting for a better one. We win the lottery and buy a nice car but then decide we can’t live without a sailboat. We finally win the heart of the man or woman we’ve been pining for and suddenly find we have a wandering eye. People can be insatiable. The Stoics believed that these kinds of desires and ambitions are not worth pursuing.

• In order to keep their minds virtuous, the Stoics practiced something like negative visualization: They imagined the worst thing that could happen in order to be prepared if certain privileges and pleasures were taken from them.

• To practice negative visualization, we have to reflect on negative events, but without worrying about them.

• In the words of Epictetus, “It’s not what happens to you, but how you react that matters."

• Another key to cultivating resilience is knowing in which time to live. Both Buddhism and Stoicism remind us that the present is all that exists, and it is the only thing we can control. Instead of worrying about the past or the future, we should appreciate things just as they are in the moment, in the now.

• We should enjoy the moment and not lose ourselves in worries about the past or the future.

• Wabi-sabi teaches us to appreciate the beauty of imperfection as an opportunity for growth.

• Instead of having a single salary, try to find a way to make money from your hobbies, at other jobs, or by starting your own business. If you have only one salary, you might be left with nothing should your employer run into trouble, leaving you in a position of fragility.

• In the sphere of romantic relationships, there are those who focus all their energy on their partner and make him or her their whole world. Those people lose everything if the relationship doesn’t work out.

• The key to becoming antifragile is taking on small risks that might lead to great reward, without exposing ourselves to dangers that might sink us.

Conclusion

• Our ikigai is different for all of us, but one thing we have in common is that we are all searching for meaning.

• Just remember to have something that keeps you busy doing what you love while being surrounded by the people who love you.