Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life

How to face life’s challenges without letting stress and worry age you

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.

Resilience isn’t just the ability to persevere. It is also an outlook we can cultivate to stay focus on the important things in life rather than what is most urgent, and to keep ourselves from being carried away by negative emotions.

we all have to face difficult moments, and the way we do this can make a huge difference to our quality of life. Proper training for our min, body, and emotional resilience is essential for confronting life’s ups and downs.

Resilience is our ability to deal with setbacks. The more resilient we are, the easier it will be to pick ourselves u pan get back to what gives meaning to our lives.

Resilient people know how to stay focused on their objectives, on what matters, without giving in to discouragement. Their flexibility is the source of their strength. They know how to adapt to change and to reversals of fortune. They concentrate on the things they can control and don’t worry about those they can’t.

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 pinning for and suddenly find we have wandering eye.

People can be impossible to satisfy

The stoics believed that these kinds of desires and ambitions are not worth pursuing. The objective of the virtuous person is to reach a state of tranquillity. the absence of negative feeling such as anxiety, fear, shame, vanity, and anger, and the presence of positive feelings such as happiness, love, serenity, and gratitude.

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.

Seneca, one of the richest men in ancient Rome, lived a life of luxury but was, nonetheless, an active stoic. He recommended practicing negative visualization every night before falling asleep. In fact, he not only imagined these negative situations, he actually put them into practice-for example, by living for a week without servants, or the food and drink he was used to as a wealthy man. As a result, he was able to answer the question “what’s the worst thing that could happen?”

The ten rules of Ikigai

1. Stay active; don’t retire
   1. those who give up the things they love doing and do well lose their purpose in life. That’s why it’s so important to keep doing things of value, making progress, bringing beauty or utility to others, helping out, and shaping the world aroud you, even after your “official” professional activityhas ended.
2. Take it slow
   1. Being in hurry is inversely proportional to quality of life. “Walk slowly and you’ll go far”. when we leave urgency behind, life and time take on new meaning.
3. Don’t fill your stomach
   1. less is more when it comes to eating for long life, too. According to the 80% rule, in order to stay healthier longer, we should eat a little less than our hunger demands instead of stuffing ourselves.
4. Surround yourself with good friends
   1. Friends are the best medicine, there for confiding worries over a good chat, sharing stories that brighten your day, getting advice, having fun, dreaming in other words, living
5. Get in shape for your next birthday
   1. water moves. it is at its best when it flows fresh and doesn’t stagnate. The body you move through life in needs a bit of daily maintenance to keep it running for a long time. Plus exercise release hormones that make uses feel happy.
6. Smile
   1. a cheerful attitude is not only relaxing. it also helps make friends. It’s good to recognize the things that aren’t so great, but we should never forget what a privilege it is to be in the here and now in a world so full of possibilities.
7. Reconnect with nature
   1. Though most people live in cities these days, human beings are made to be part of natural world. we should return to it often to recharge our batteries.
8. Give thanks
   1. to your ancestors, to nature, which provides you with the air you breathe and the food you eat, to your friends and family, to everything that brightens your days and makes you feel lucky to be alive. spend a moment every day giving thanks, and you’ll watch your stockpile of happiness grow.
9. Live in the moment
   1. stop regretting the past and fearing the future. today is all you have. make the most of it. make it worth remembering.
10. Follow your ikigai
    1. there is passion inside you, a unique talent that gives meaning to your days and drives you to share the best of yourself until the very end. if you don’t know what your ikigai is yet, as viktor frankl says, your mission is to discover it

How to live longer and better by finding your purpose

What is logotherapy?

A collegeue once asked viktor frankl to define his school of psychology in a single phrase, to which frankl replied, “Well, in logotherapy the patient sits up straight and has to listen to things that are, on occasion, hear to hear.”

The Colleague had just described psychoanalysis to him in the following terms: “In psychoanalysis, the patient lies down on a couch and tells you things that are, on occasion, hard to say.”

Frankl explains that one of the first questions he would ask his patients was “why do you not commit suicide?” Usually the patient found good reasons not to, and was able to carry on. What, then, does logotherapy do?

The answer is pretty clear: “It helps you find reasons to live”

Logotheraphy pushes patients to consciously discover their life’s purpose in order to confront their neuroses. Their quest to fulfill their destiny then motivates them to press forward, breaking the mental chains of the past and overcoming whatever obstacles they encounter along the way.

The Search for meaning

Frankl himself would live and die for his principles and ideals. His experiences as a prisoner at auschwitz showed him that “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” It was something he had to go through alone, without any help, and it inspired him for the rest of his life.

Fight for yourself

Logotherapy does not see this frustration as mental illness, the way other forms of therapy do, but rather as spiritual anguish a natural and beneficial phenomenon that derives those who suffer from it to seek a cure, whether on their own or with help of others, and in so doing to find greater satisfaction in life. It helps them change their own destiny.

In man’s search for meaning, Frankl cites one of Nietzsche’s famous aphorisms:

He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.

Based on his own experience, Frankl believed that our health depends on that natural tension that comes from comparing what we’ve accomplished so far with what we’d like to achieve in the future. What we need, then, is not a peaceful existence, but a challenge we can strive to meet by applying all the skills at our disposal.

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. They often try to fill the gap between what is expected of them and what they want for themselves with economic power or physical pleasure, or by numing their senses. It can even lead to suicide.

Sunday neurosis, for example, is what happens when, without the obligations and commitments of the workweek, the individual realizes how empty he is inside. He has to find a solution. Above all, he has to find his purpose, his reason for getting out fo bed-his ikigai.

According to logotherapy, discovering one’s purpose in life helps an individual fill that existential void. Frankl, a man who faced his problems and turned his objectives into actions, could look back on his life in peace as he grew old. He did not have to envy those still enjoying their youth, because he had amassed a broad set of experiences that showed he had lived for something.

How to turn work and free time into spaces for growth

Ikigai

What is your reason for being?

What the world’s longest living people eat and drink

Okinawa’s miracle diet

The mortality rate from cardiovascular disaese in okinawa is lowest in japan, and diet almost certainly has a lot to do with this. It is no coincidence that the “Okinawa Diet” is so often discussed aroudn the world at panels on nutrition

The most concreate and widely cited data on diet in okinawa come from studies by makoto suzuki, a cardiologist at the university of tyukyus, who has published more than seven hundred scientific articles on nutrition and again in olinawa since 1970.

They reached the following conclusions

• locals eat a wide variety of foods, especially vegetables. Variety seems to be key. A study of Okinawa’s centenarians showed that they at 206 different foods, incuding spices, on a regular basis. They ate a average of eighteen different foods each day, a striking contrast to the nutritional poverty of our fast food culture.
• They eat at least fiver servings of gruits and vegetables every day. At least seven types of fruits and vegetables are consumded by okinawans on a daily basis. The easiest way to check if there is enough variety on your table is to make sure you’re “easting the rainbow” a table featuring red peppers, carrots, spinach, cauliflower, and eggplant, for example, offers great color and variety. Vegetables, potatoes, legumes, and soy products such as tofu are the staples of an okinawan’s diet. More than 30% of their daily calories comes from vegetables.
• Grains are the foundation of their diet. Japanese people eatt white rice everyday, somtimes adding noodles. Rice is the primary food in Okinawa, as well.
• They rarely eat sugar, and if they do, it’s cane sugar. We drove through several sugarcan fields every mornignon our way to Ogimi, and even drank a glass of cane juice at Nakikin Castle. Beside the stall selling the juice was a sing describing the anticarcinogenics befits of sugarcane.

In addition to these basic dietary principles, Okinawans eat fish an average of three times per week; unlike in other parts of japan, the most frequently consumed meat is pork, though locals eat it only once or twice per week.

Along these lines, sudies indicate the following

• Okinawans consume, in general, one-third as much sugar as the rest of Japan’s population, which means that sweets and chocolate are much less a part of their diet.
• They also eat practically half as much salt as the rest of Japan. 7 grams per day, compared to an average of 12.
• They consume fewer calories. an average of 1785 perday, compared to 2068 in the rest of Japna. In fact, low calorric intake is common among the fiver blue zones.

15 natural antioxidants found in the Okinawan diet

Antioxidants are molecules that slow the oxidation process in cells, neutralizing the free radicals that cause damage and accelerate againg. The antioxidant power of geren tea, for example is well known, and will be discussed later at greter length.

Because they are rich in antioxidants and are eaten nearly every day in the region, these fifteen foods are considered keys to Okinawan vitality

• Tofu
• Miso
• Tuna
• Carrots
• Goya (bitter melon)
• Kombu (sea kelp)
• Cabbage
• Nori (sea weed)
• Onion
• Soy sprouts
• Hechima (cucumber like gourd)
• Soybeans (boiled or raw)
• Sweet potato
• Peppers
• Sanpin- cha(jasmine tea)

The secreats of green tea

Green tea has been credited for centuries with singnificant medicinal properties. Recent studies have confirmed its many benefits, and hae attested to the importance of this ancient plant in the longevity of those who dink it often.

Originally from china, wher eit has been consumed for millennia, geren tea didn’t make its way to the rest of the world until just few centuries ago. Unlike other teas, as a result of being air-dried without fermentation, it reatains its active elemetnss even after being dried and crumbles. It offers meaninful health benifits such as;

• Controlling cholesterol
• lowering blood sugar levels
• Improving circulation
• Protection against the flue (vitamin c)
• Promoting bone health (fluoride)
• Protection against certain bacterial infections
• protection against UV damage
• cleansing the diuretic effects