The Nine Keys To Good Mental Wellbeing

Today’s main feature is a bit “pop psychology”, but it has its underpinnings in actual psychology, and is especially useful if approached from that angle.

What it’s most popularly enjoyed as:

• A personality-typing system.
• People love little quizzes and identifiers and such.

What it’s actually really useful as:

• A tool for understanding why people (including ourselves) are the way we are
• A foundational knowledge for living better ourselves, and helping others too

This stems from the fairly simple principle, uncontroversial in psychology:

• We have needs, desires, and aversions
• We act in a way that tries to get our needs met and avoid suffering
• Thus: Need/Fear → Motivation → Action

The Enneagram

The Enneagram (ἐννέα = “nine” in Ancient Greek) system posits that we each have one fundamental need/fear (from a list of nine) that’s strongest for us. A deep-seated insecurity/longing, that we’ll go to almost any lengths to try to meet. Sometimes, in good ways, sometimes, bad.

The Nine Basic Fears/Insecurities, And Their Corresponding Needs/Desires:

1. Fear of being a fundamentally bad, wrong person / Need to be good and correct
2. Fear of being fundamentally unloveable / Need to be loved
3. Fear of being fundamentally worthless / Need to be valued
4. Fear of being like everyone else / Need to be different
5. Fear of being useless / Need to be useful
6. Fear of being outcast / Need to have a set place in the group
7. Fear of missing out / Need to experience things
8. Fear of being hurt or controlled / Need to be in control
9. Fear of conflict / Need to be at peace

Of course, most of us have most of these fears/needs to some extent, though usually one will stand out—especially if we aren’t managing it well. The less healthy our coping mechanisms, the more obvious it is how we’re trying to overcompensate in some fashion. For example:

1. A person who fears being wrong and so becomes a perfectionist rules-abider to a fault
2. A person who fears being unloveable, and so exaggerates problems to get pity, as the next best thing
3. A person who fears being worthless, and so exaggerates their accomplishments in order to be admired and valued
4. A person who fears being like everyone else, and so descends into a “nobody could ever possibly understand me” black hole of pathos.
5. A person who fears being useless, so burns themself out trying to be an omnicompetent Leonardo da Vinci without ever actually taking the time to stop and smell the flowers as Leonardo did.
6. A person who fears being outcast, so becomes clingy, passive-aggressive, and suspicious
7. A person who fears missing out, so tries to experience all the things all the time, ruining their health with dizzying highs and crushing lows.
8. A person who fears being hurt or controlled, so becomes aggressive and domineering
9. A person who fears conflict, so shuts down at the slightest hint of it

If we have healthier coping mechanisms, these same nine people can look a lot different, but in much more subtle ways because we’re not trying to overcompensate so badly:

1. A person who lives their life rationally by principles that can be adapted as they learn
2. A person who loves and is loved, as perhaps the most notable part of their character
3. A person who sets reasonable goals and accomplishes them, and seeks to uplift others
4. A person who creates and innovates, enriching their own life and the lives of others
5. A person who is simply very competent and knowledgeable, without overstretching
6. A person who is dependable and loyal, and a reliable part of something bigger than themself
7. A person who is fun to be around and loves trying new things, while also knowing how to relax
8. A person who develops their leadership skills and is a tower of strength for others
9. A person who knows how to make peace and does so—by themself, and with others

By being aware of our own fears/insecurities that may drive our motivations and thus underpin our behaviors, we can usually manage them in a much more mindful fashion. Same goes when it comes to managing interactions with other people, too:

• Letting the Type 3 know you value them, not their accomplishments or what they can do for you.
• Appreciating the Type 5’s (varied or specialist) skills and knowledge.
• Giving love to a Type 2 unprompted, but on your own terms, with your own boundaries.
• And so on for other types

Or for yourself…

• As a Type 8, remembering that you can let go sometimes and let someone else be in charge.
• As a Type 1, catching yourself holding yourself (or others) to impossible standards, and then easing up on that a little.
• As a Type 9, remembering to stand up for yourself and others, however gently, but firmly.
• And so on for other types

If you’re unsure what to focus on, ask yourself: what’s your worst nightmare or greatest daydream? Then work out what it is about that, that makes it feel so bad or good.

Then, approach things mindfully. Catch yourself in your unhealthy coping mechanisms, and find healthy ones instead.

What if I get my type wrong? Or I get someone else’s type wrong?

Obviously it’s better to get them right for maximum effect, but you can never go too far wrong anyway… because we all have all nine of those qualities in us, it’s just a matter of how strong a factor each is for us. So in the worst case scenario, you’ll make someone feel more secure about something that was only a very minor insecurity for them, for example.

Or in the case of your own type, you may mistakenly think you’re acing being the world’s healthiest Type 5, until you realize you’re actually a Type 3 who thought learning all those things would make you more worthy (spoiler: those things are great, but you’re worthy already). Again, not the end of the world! No matter what, you’re learning and growing, and that’s good.

Want to delve further?

Read: The Nine Enneagram Type Descriptions (Basic, but more detailed descriptions than the above)

Read: How The Enneagram System Works (More complex. Now we’re getting into the more arcane stuff we didn’t have time for today—wings and lines, triads, health levels, directions of integration and disintegration, and more)

Like learning from books? Here are our top two picks, depending on your learning style:

• The Wisdom of the Enneagram – Very comprehensive textbook and guide to improving your coping mechanism and growing as a person.
• The Enneagram Made Easy – it explains it with cartoons!

We’d love to offer a quick free test here, but all the tests we could find either require paid registration or are wildly inaccurate, so we’ll not waste your time.

However, we do also think that working it out for yourself is better, as it means you have a handle on what those ideas, fears, insecurities, desires, needs, really mean to you—that way you can actually use the information!

We’ll close by repeating our previous advice: If you’re unsure what to focus on, ask yourself: what’s your worst nightmare or greatest daydream? Then work out what it is about those scenarios that make them so bad or good. That’ll help you find your real fears/needs, such that you can work on them.

Good luck!

The Science Of Motivation (And How To Use It To Your Advantage)

When we do something rewarding, our brain gets a little (or big!) spike of dopamine. Dopamine is popularly associated with pleasure—which is fair— but there’s more to it than this.

Dopamine is also responsible for motivation itself, as a prime mover before we do the thing that we find rewarding. If we eat a banana, and enjoy it, perhaps because our body needed the nutrients from it, our brain gets a hit of dopamine.

(and not because bananas contain dopamine; that dopamine is useful for the body, but can’t pass the blood-brain barrier to have an effect on the brain)

So where does the dopamine in our brain come from? That dopamine is made in the brain itself.

Key Important Fact: the brain produces dopamine when it expects an activity to be rewarding.

If you take nothing else away from today’s newsletter, let it be this!

It makes no difference if the activity is then not rewarding. And, it will keep on motivating you to do something it anticipated being rewarding, no matter how many times the activity disappoints, because it’ll remember the very dopamine that it created, as having been the reward.

To put this into an example:

• How often have you spent time aimlessly scrolling social media, flitting between the same three apps, or sifting through TV channels when “there’s nothing good on to watch”?
• And how often did you think afterwards “that was a good and rewarding use of my time; I’m glad I did that”?

In reality, whatever you felt like you were in search of, you were really in search of dopamine. And you didn’t find it, but your brain did make some, just enough to keep you going.

Don’t try to “dopamine detox”, though.

While taking a break from social media / doomscrolling the news / mindless TV-watching can be a great and healthful idea, you can’t actually “detox” from a substance your body makes inside itself.

Which is fortunate, because if you could, you’d die, horribly and miserably.

If you could “detox” completely from dopamine, you’d lose all motivation, and also other things that dopamine is responsible for, including motor control, language faculties, and critical task analysis (i.e. planning).

This doesn’t just mean that you’d not be able to plan a wedding; it also means:

• you wouldn’t be able to plan how to get a drink of water
• you wouldn’t have any motivation to get water even if you were literally dying of thirst
• you wouldn’t have the motor control to be able to physically drink it anyway

Read: Dopamine and Reward: The Anhedonia Hypothesis 30 years on

(this article is deep and covers a lot of ground, but is a fascinating read if you have time)

Note: if you’re wondering why that article mentions schizophrenia so much, it’s because schizophrenia is in large part a disease of having too much dopamine.

Consequently, antipsychotic drugs (and similar) used in the treatment of schizophrenia are generally dopamine antagonists, and scientists have been working on how to treat schizophrenia without also crippling the patient’s ability to function.

Do be clever about how you get your dopamine fix

Since we are hardwired to crave dopamine, and the only way to outright quash that craving is by inducing anhedonic depression, we have to leverage what we can’t change.

The trick is: question how much your motivation aligns with your goals (or doesn’t).

So if you feel like checking Facebook for the eleventieth time today, ask yourself: “am I really looking for new exciting events that surely happened in the past 60 seconds since I last checked, or am I just looking for dopamine?”

You might then realize: “Hmm, I’m actually just looking for dopamine, and I’m not going to find it there”

Then, pick something else to do that will actually be more rewarding. It helps if you make a sort of dopa-menu in advance, of things to pick from. You can keep this as a list on your phone, or printed and pinned up near your computer.

Examples might be: Working on that passion project of yours, or engaging in your preferred hobby. Or spending quality time with a loved one. Or doing housework (surprisingly not something we’re commonly motivated-by-default to do, but actually is rewarding when done). Or exercising (same deal). Or learning that language on Duolingo (all those bells and whistles the app has are very much intentional dopamine-triggers to make it addictive, but it’s not a terrible outcome to be addicted to learning!).

Basically… Let your brain’s tendency to get led astray work in your favor, by putting things in front of it that will lead you in good directions.

Things for your health and/or education are almost always great things to allow yourself the “ooh, shiny” reaction and pick them up, try something new, etc.