Are you happy? I mean content and feeling like you are settling down and not much worries in your life. How is your relationship doing? How about your job? Do you have constant worries about your financial situation? Are you really content about what is happening around your life?
We've discussed about diet and circadian rhythm in earlier posts. How about your mental and emotional stress? There are people who may be eating a clean nutritious diet, and sleep well most nights, but if they are suffering from a poor stressful relationship or perhaps a stressful tiring job, you are looking at downfall of a very important pillar of health. Unfaithful spouse, terrible work environment and boss, family problems, you name it, plenty of different mental and emotional stressors.
Your diet may be perfectly tuned for your body and you may be getting eight hours of sleep every night, but if you are in an unhealthy relationship, or you hate your job, chances are your fight or flight reaction is still going to be activated far more often than is healthy for you. The bottom line, if you aren’t happy with your life you are going to be overly stressed.
Remember, your body does not make distinctions between physical, mental, emotional or spiritual stress. The crunch of a deadline for a project you really dislike and running from a bear while you’re hiking will have the same effect on your body, triggering your fight or flight systems in exactly the same way at the physiological level of reality. Why is it that our careers and life choices so often fail to bring us happiness? The answer lies in our values.
Each of us has a core set of values, even if we are not able to articulate them very clearly. These core values represent the needs that must be met in order for us to live a fulfilling life, they define the way we want to live our lives. Our values tell us about the sorts of people and organizations we want to have relationships with, the way we want to be treated by those around us, and the human characteristics we most want to emulate in our lives. They also shape the goals we set for ourselves.
It’s only when one’s lifestyle is in alignment with one’s values that we are truly happy. When we don’t live by our values, the stressors we encounter become genuinely distressing; this is precisely when they trigger our fight or flight system. If you value the environment, for example, and the company you work for frequently ignores environmental concerns in order to further their bottom line, you might probably find it extremely stressful to work for that company. If you value integrity, honesty and fairness, and your company takes advantage of its employees and customers, you probably find working there distressing. The more ways in which your work violates your values, the more stressful your job becomes. The same is true in any of our personal and spiritual relationships.
Our values inspire our choices with meaning and give us the ability to cope with the challenges we face. When we run into challenges in our lives, we can face them squarely if there is a good reason to endure them. Imagine being in a relationship in which you’re constantly arguing with your partner. If that relationship does not meet with your values − for example, your partner does not particularly care about finances, honesty and equality in the same way you do, then why are you involved? What meaning or purpose does the relationship serve? In general, the anger and resentment you’re enduring with your partner is going to be much worse for your wellbeing because the relationship itself does not share mutual values. The experience can be valuable if it helps you to better understand what’s truly important to you, but if you’re enduring pain without reason, your stress will just become more and more distressing.
When you are not living in accordance with your core values, the challenges you face are potentially harmful physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually. As long as you continue to live this way your survival systems are going to be active, and as you now know, long term activation of fight or flight is the source of much of the aches, pains and illnesses we humans suffer.
You can often tell when people are not living according to their values because they will suffer from some combination of below symptoms or conditions:
• Fatigue
• Mood swings
• Depression
• Pimples
• Nervousness
• Poor sleep
• Upset stomach
• Diarrhea
• Neck/shoulder pains
• Headaches
• Poor concentration
Each of these can be traced back to the chronic activation of our survival systems due to lifestyle choices that now cause us to be stressful. The reason why so many of us face overly burdensome stress in our relationships and career is because we tend to equate success with happiness. We have been taught that if we can just succeed in our jobs, make more money, and start a family that everything will fall into place. In fact, there are far more unhappy successful people than there are happy successful people. Some of you might not agree but that's just the ugly truth.
The problem is that success and happiness are not the same. A lot of people tend to confuse success with being content or happy. Ask yourself, 'What makes you feel happy to be alive, and excited about waking up tomorrow?' Sadly, the most common answer I get from most people, even from the ones that most other people consider successful is, 'I don’t know.' Imagine waking up and telling yourself, 'Damn! I don't want to go to work today! I hate my job!'.
When a person is successful without being happy, they frequently excel because they have become very proficient at doing what other people want them to do. They are good at solving other people’s problems, sacrificing themselves because they have traded their own core values for those of whom they’re working for or trying to please. If you want to be at your healthiest, you’ll need to be clear on your values and whether your life is in alignment or at odds with those values. That’s when you’ll start to experience the symptoms I’ve described above. In other words, your career may be bringing in the money, the house and the car that you want, but if it does it in a way that isn’t in harmony with your values, you’re going to experience the aches, pains and diseases that go along with the choices you’ve made. From the outside, people, friends, and relatives may think that you are wealthy, owns luxury cars, huge mansion and has a big happy family. But, do you really achieve and have the happiness you want?
One consequence of sacrificing one’s values that I’ve seen repeatedly with many people is the emergence of addictions. For example, I’ve seen people who, because of their constant struggling to align their core values with those of their family, religion, friends or corporation, developed addictions to drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, sugar, food, sex, porn and even violence.
Now, your core value set is essentially your contract with your self as to how you should invest your time and your precious life force. I tell my students, 'Life is a boomerang and you always get back exactly what you throw out!' Living by your core value set is essentially loading your own energetic boomerang with what you want to return to you. To the degree that you are honest about and live according to your values, you are likely to be happy!
Learning about your personal values begins by learning about your basic needs and how to take care of them. You might break these basic needs down into physical, mental and emotional and spiritual categories. For example, take a moment to ask yourself:
What are my physical health needs?
• Do you have any particular conditions that need to be taken care of specifically? What are your dietary needs? What are your exercise needs? Are you a sedentary person or are you an athlete, or someone in between? If you are not a professional athlete, then your dietary and exercise needs will probably be extremely different from someone who is an elite athlete.
What do I need in my life to be mentally happy and healthy?
• What kind of mental challenges do you like? Do you really enjoy intricate, foreign films? Do you enjoy Crossword Puzzle or brainteasers? How much quiet time or rest do you need to be mentally focused?
What do I need in my life to be emotionally happy and healthy?
• Do you need a great deal of social time in order to be emotionally satisfied? What kinds of people do you feel best socializing with? How does your home need to be arranged so that it makes you feel comfortable, safe and secure?
What do I need in my life to be spiritually happy and healthy?
• What inspires you so that you feel connected to a higher power? Do you spend time in nature? How easy is it for you to forgive yourself or others? Do you require quiet meditation time?
These questions address your essential, personal needs in order for you to be empowered to achieve and live a fulfilled life. The idea is that your personal values should support all of your needs very clearly so that you can use them as a guide when making life choices.
It’s a universal truth that you cannot take care of others any better than you can take care of yourself. So before you can even begin to think about entering into a relationship with someone, starting a business, or having a family, it’s important to take the time to become very clear about your personal values and to become competent living by them. Every single one of us, regardless of who we are, serves as a living example for those with less life-experience and personal development.
Are you an example of how to live a healthy vibrant life guided by your values? Do you do what you preach? Careers consume a huge amount of time and energy and for most people, who work on average forty five hours each week. When we multiply that by four weeks a month and twelve months a year, that is a tremendous amount of energy output. Because careers do play such a central role in our lives, it’s important that your choice of profession and the professional environment that you create for yourself resonates with your values. Beyond capturing income needs (which is an important professional value), your professional values define your strengths and skills, ethics and integrity. For example, how you treat your co-workers and how you want your co-workers and employers to treat you would reflect that value. Your professional values determine the effects of your work with others.
Now, let's talk a little bit about relationship values. The relationships we have with others can be empowering, giving us the opportunity to grow, or they can become a real source of distress. Because they do have such a powerful impact personally and professionally, it’s crucial to understand your relationships and how they add to or detract from your happiness and your health. If you are not living according to your personal values, then you’re going to have a rough time in relationships of any kind, whether they’re personal, professional or spiritual. Remember the principle, 'you can’t take care of others any better than you can take care of yourself'.
Once you have uncovered your values and really begin to live by them, you will have set yourself firmly on the path to happiness. The joy you’ll get from living in this way will be profoundly different than anything you have felt before. Living by your values is true living and anyone who’s truly lived life always feels nourished and gratified. That doesn’t mean that all of life’s challenges are eliminated, but you’ll know that your love and joy has become love and joy for many others. When one is truly happy in life there is a deep sense of personal fulfillment, gratification and grace. The quality of your life experience will positively be enhanced. A life of meaning and value is clearly a life worth living!
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