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!

Ikigai: A Closer Look

We’ve mentioned ikigai from time to time, usually when discussing the characteristics associated with Blue Zone centenarians, for example as number 5 of…

The Five Pillars Of Longevity

It’s about finding one’s “purpose”. Not merely a function, but what actually drives you in life. And, if Japanese studies can be extrapolated to the rest of the world, it has a significant and large impact on mortality (other factors being controlled for); not having a sense of ikigai is associated with an approximately 47%* increase in 7-year mortality risk in the categories of cardiovascular disease and external cause mortality:

Sense of life worth living (ikigai) and mortality in Japan: Ohsaki Study

*we did a lot of averaging and fuzzy math to get this figure; the link will show you the full stats though!

In case that huge (n=43,391) study didn’t convince you, here’s another comparably-sized (n=43,117) one that found similarly, albeit framing the numbers the other way around, i.e. a comparable decrease in mortality risk for having a sense of ikigai:

Associations of ikigai as a positive psychological factor with all-cause mortality and cause-specific mortality among middle-aged and elderly Japanese people

This study was even longer (12 years rather than 7), so the fact that it found pretty much the same results the 7-year study we cited just before is quite compelling evidence. Again, multivariate hazard ratios were adjusted for age, BMI, drinking and smoking status, physical activity, sleep duration, education, occupation, marital status, perceived mental stress, and medical history—so all these things were effectively controlled for statistically.

Three kinds of ikigai

There are three principal kinds of ikigai:

• Social ikigai: for example, a caring role in the family or community, volunteer work, teaching
• Asocial ikigai: for example, a solitary practice of self-discipline, spirituality, or study without any particular intent to teach others
• Antisocial ikigai: for example, a strong desire to outlive an enemy, or to harm a person or group that one hates

You may be thinking: wait, aren’t those last things bad?

And… Maybe! But ikigai is not a matter of morality or even about “warm fuzzy feelings”. The fact is, having a sense of purpose increases longevity regardless of moral implications or niceness.

Nevertheless, for obvious reasons there is a lot more focus on the first two categories (social and asocial), and of those, especially the first category (social), because on a social level, “we all do well when we all do well”.

We exemplified them above, but they can be defined:

• Social: working for the betterment of society
• Asocial: working for the betterment of oneself

Of course, for many people, the same ikigai may cover both of those—often somebody who excels at something for its own sake and/but shares it with others to enrich their lives also, for example a teacher, an artist, a scientist, etc.

For it to cover both, however, requires that both parts of it are genuinely part of their feeling of ikigai, and not merely unintended consequences.

For example, a piano teacher who loves music in general and the piano in particular, and would gladly spend every waking moment studying/practising/performing, but hates having to teach it, but needs to pay the bills so teaches it anyway, cannot be said to be living any kind of social ikigai there, just asocial. And in fact, if teaching the piano is causing them to not have the time or energy to pursue it for its own sake, they might not even be living any ikigai at all.

One other thing to watch out for

There is one last stumbling block, which is that while we can find ikigai, we can also lose it! Examples of this may include:

• A professional whose job is their ikigai, until they face mandatory retirement or are otherwise unable to continue their work (perhaps due to disability, for example)
• A parent whose full-time-parent role is their ikigai, until their children leave for school, university, life in general
• A married person whose “devoted spouse” role is their ikigai, until their partner dies

For this reason, people of any age can have a “crisis of identity” that’s actually more of a “crisis of purpose”.

There are two ways of handling this:

1. Have a back-up ikigai ready! For example, if your profession is your ikigai, maybe you have a hobby waiting in the wings, that you can smoothly jump ship to upon retirement.
2. Embrace the fluidity of life! Sometimes, things don’t happen the way we expect. Sometimes life’s surprises can trip us up; sometimes they can leave us a sobbing wreck. But so long as life continues, there is an opportunity to pick ourselves up and decide where to go from that point. Note that this is not fatalism, by the way, it doesn’t have to be “this bad thing happened so that we could find this good thing, so really it was a good thing all along”. Rather, it can equally readily be “well, we absolutely did not want that bad thing to happen, but since it did, now we shall take it this way from here”.

For more on developing/maintaining psychological resilience in the face of life’s less welcome adversities, see:

Psychological Resilience Training

…and:

Putting The Abs Into Absurdity ← do not underestimate the power of this one

Take care!