Hi, Mahrukh! If you could recommend One Good Thing everyone can do to improve their mental health, what would it be?

My one good thing to improve mental wellbeing is to invite a greater sense of purpose to your life, through pursuing intentional and meaningful activities daily, weekly and monthly.

Interesting. Why is purpose so vital?

In positive psychology, purpose is the motivation that guides us to set meaningful goals, align with our values and contribute to something greater.

Having a sense of purpose brings immense richness to our everyday lives. We gain meaning from experiences and situations – big or small – and reflecting on the cosmic meaning of everything. Without it, we have lower levels of mental health. Despite this, many of us don’t seem to prioritise doing the things that matter to us the most. This results in us designing a life that has little pleasure, fulfilment or satisfaction.

So how do we do your One Good Thing?

There are many routes. It could be through reflecting on our values, setting meaningful goals, practising acts of kindness, nurturing positive relationships or finding meaning in stressful times.

A great place to start is values exploration. We spend a lot of our time as a society thinking about our goals. Values are not the same as goals: values are how we want to behave, and goals are things we want to achieve. They are what we stand for in life and give us purpose. We can think of them as an inner compass to choose effective actions. Translating our values into effective action – action that is aligned with who we are and what matters the most – requires us to really understand what we stand for. Without this, when we are disconnected from our values, we can act in ways that are incongruent with the ways we want to be in life. Living life guided by our values, on the other hand, allows us to feel more engaged and experience life as rich and meaningful.

Here’s a three-step process for working out your values:

1. Reflect on your top five values for each of three categories: work, relationships and hobbies. You may want to use value tables to help you, such as the table of values from acceptance and commitment therapy.
2. Consider how your values show up presently in the three categories. Rate each category out of 10 (10 being values that clearly show up in your daily/monthly activities).
3. Reflect on small steps you can take to make that number a little better. How does this translate into daily/weekly/monthly actions?

What are the benefits of prioritising purpose?

Interestingly, research spotlights that high levels of purpose in individuals are associated with physical wellbeing benefits such as longevity, slower advancement of cognitive decline and healthier immune systems, along with psychological boosts including happiness, protection against psychological distress (eg burnout) and more satisfying relationships.

Having a strong sense of purpose is a human need. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a five-tier model exploring our needs as humans. The bottom of the hierarchy incorporates our physiological needs (nutrition, sleep, clothing). The next level is our safety needs (security, protection, freedom from fear). Psychological needs form the next two levels of the pyramid: love and belonging (friendship, intimacy) and esteem needs (positive self-evaluation, prestige, feeling of accomplishment). Self-actualisation lies at the top of the pyramid. This need focuses on meaning, growth, transcendence, exploration and play. The needs lower down the pyramid must be satisfied before individuals can proceed to the needs higher up. In the West, our basic needs of food, shelter and security are often met, as is our psychological need for belonging. This leaves us in a position to consider the highest human need: creating a life that deeply excites us, nourishes our curiosity, is rich and meaningful, and in which we emotionally grow.

What are some common pitfalls of your One Good Thing? How can we avoid them?

Failing to be intentional and not remembering to focus on purpose in the first place! Like any habit, it can take some time to ingrain. Visual cues help to nudge us to lean into our sense of meaning, such as writing out our top values and having them on our desk/in a visible place at home. Regular check-ins can also help, where we take a mindful breath and ask what one thing can I do today that sits with my values?

How do you personally do your One Good Thing?

I start the year by reviewing my values. I use value cards, laying each of them out and selecting the ones that resonate with me the most, both related to work and outside. I then map out how I can specifically translate my values into actions, through aligning them with my goals. Using this information, I create a vision board that I can then keep as a visual reminder to lean into my meaningful activities during the year.

Life can be squiggly, and so during challenges, I draw upon my sense of meaning to help me process what’s going on. In psychology we call this ‘benefit finding’, where we reframe the negative outcome by considering the concept of ‘when one door closes, another door opens’. This helps me lean into remembering that there are other routes to my goal and the hidden benefits of taking that other ‘door’ in life.

And how has doing this changed your life?

This One Good Thing has massively changed my life for the better! Prior to having a clear sense of my why, life felt monotonous. Leaning into my sense of purpose has made me feel more engaged with life, happier, able to persist with setbacks with greater ease and have deeper connections. I feel like it’s a very underrated aspect of our mental wellbeing and gets very little airtime. For me, the quote that sums it up the best, and one that I draw upon regularly, comes from Viktor Frankl, who so beautifully put it: “The meaning of life is to give life meaning.”

Frame Of Mind is Stylist’s home for all things mental health and the mind. From expert advice on the small changes you can make to improve your wellbeing to first-person essays and features on topics ranging from autism to antidepressants, we’ll be exploring mental health in all its forms. You can check out the series home page to get started.

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