Category: well-being

It’s about conditioning

In every situation, whatever you are being and doing, your feeling and stories are a product of your conditioning. You were born with a set of pre-conditionings, a combination of human instinct and genetics. From then on, every experience you’ve had has slowly moulded this into the conditioning that you are running now.

Often, this conditioning does not serve us well. It can produce a lot of negative feelings and egocentric stories. Left unchecked, this leads to a set of thoughts and actions that do anything but improve our well-being. This is the default mode. We need to become aware that most of what we think is a direct result of this conditioning loop.

This will always be the case, but we can use this awareness to our advantage, by closely observing how we feel and the narratives we intuitively craft. From there we can decide if they are supporting our efforts to optimize well-being. If not, we have an opportunity to change, editing the story, understanding that all feelings are temporary. This will create more of the experiences that promote well-being, which then feeds back to continue moulding our conditioning in a favourable light.

It takes practice. It takes attention, awareness, and acceptance. And it can change everything.

Be well.

Well-being depends on context

When asked to evaluate your well-being, your mind will naturally focus on only a few aspects of your life. It is an impossible task to assess the totality of your experiences to date, arriving at some value representing the whole. By focusing on one or a couple of things, your mind is trying to define the context within which well-being can be tested.

This makes sense because as you go about your day, moving from home to outside, from work to family life, the immediate environment, and your role in it, changes. And you feel these changes. Everyone knows the feeling of relief you experience after leaving a hard day at work or school, anticipating a chance to relax at home.

The important concept here is that well-being depends on context. And every context boils down to one of two things: being or doing. Fortunately these align perfectly with the only two things we control, our thoughts and actions, but we will explore that at a later time.

The best way to think about being is what you perceive to be your role or identity in a given situation; child, sibling, parent, friend, colleague, professional, student, lover, athlete, the options are boundless. These labels determine our stories, and hence, our well-being. Doing, by contrast, is how we play out these roles, literally the actions we take.

Here’s the practical point. To improve well-being, we must first determine the context within which we wish for change. Meditating on this is the necessary groundwork for positive progress. Take some time to find the contexts, being and doing, that are most important to you.

What is well-being?

We have covered that the Human Condition allows us to have experiences within consciousness, our only true possession. I have also said that everyone is going about the same project, albeit in various and frenetic ways, to improve their well-being. The trouble is, most of us don’t know what outcome we seek.

Everyone has a sense that things could be better, motivating movement away from the current state toward some hazy destination where we will be relieved of tension, finding peace and tranquility. This destination, of course, is a mirage. But do not be discouraged. Greater understanding is needed.

Well-being is not a thing that you get. It is something that you experience. This is why it is not a place where we arrive, so much as something that washes over us from time to time. To optimize well-being we need to design our lives in a way that positions us to capture more experiences of it.

The components of well-being help to underscore my point. Coming from the positive psychology world these include positive emotions, engagement (when you apply your strengths to something you care about), positive relationships, meaning (or purpose), and accomplishment. These are the things we are trying to capture in our experiences.

Take some time to reflect on the components of well-being. Consider how the different aspects of your life, and the stories you tell yourself about them, include them or not. Keep following and we will continue to explore how to optimize well-being.

Be well.