IKIGAI – The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life

by Francesc Miralles and Hector Garcia

Only staying active will make you want to live a hundred years. —Japanese proverb
The word ‘ikigai’ means “the happiness of always being busy,”
The book explores the extraordinary longevity of the Japanese, especially on the island of Okinawa, where there are 24.55 people over the age of 100 for every 100,000 inhabitants—far more than the global average. Ogimi, a rural town on the north end of the island with a population of three thousand, boasts the highest life expectancy in the world—a fact that has earned it the nickname the Village of Longevity.
According to the Japanese, everyone has an ikigai—what a French philosopher might call a raison d’être (reason for being). Our ikigai is the reason we get up in the morning.

Don’t retire! Many Japanese people never really retire—they keep doing what they love for as long as their health allows.
According to scientists, the keys to longevity are diet, exercise, finding a purpose in life (an ikigai), and forming strong social ties—that is, having a broad circle of friends and good family relations.
They don’t do strenuous exercise, but they do move every day, taking walks and working in their vegetable gardens. Gardening, which involves daily low-intensity movement, is a practice almost all of them have in common.

Food

One of the most common sayings in Japan is “Fill your belly to 80 percent”, which implies that we should stop eating when we are starting to feel full. Avoid overeating and wearing down the body with long digestive processes that accelerate cellular oxidation. By presenting their meals on many small plates, the Japanese tend to eat less.
The Okinawan diet is rich in tofu, sweet potatoes, fish (three times per week), and vegetables (roughly 11 ounces per day).

Community

It is customary in Okinawa to form close bonds within local communities. These are informal groups of people with common interests who look out for one another. For many, serving the community becomes part of their ikigai.
The feeling of belonging and support gives the individual a sense of security and helps increase life expectancy.

Mind-Body Connection

Both mind and body are important, and that the health of one is connected to that of the other. It has been shown that maintaining an active, adaptable mind is one of the key factors in staying young. This is why it’s so important to give your brain a workout.
People, especially older people, like to do things as they’ve always done them. The problem is that when the brain develops ingrained habits, it doesn’t need to think anymore. Things get done quickly and efficiently on automatic pilot, often in a very advantageous way. This creates a tendency to stick to routines, and the only way of breaking these is to confront the brain with new information.–Eduard Punset. Presented with new information, the brain creates new connections and is revitalized.
Collins Hemingway and Shlomo Breznitz in their book Maximum Brainpower: Challenging the Brain for Health and Wisdom, mental training is beneficial on many levels: “You begin exercising your brain by doing a certain task for the first time,” he writes. “And at first it seems very difficult, but as you learn how to do it, the training is already working. The second time, you realize that it’s easier, not harder, to do, because you’re getting better at it. This has a fantastic effect on a person’s mood. In and of itself, it is a transformation that affects not only the results obtained, but also his or her self-image.”
Simply interacting with others—playing a game, for example—offers new stimuli and helps prevent the depression that can come with solitude.
Research into the causes of premature aging has shown that stress has a lot to do with it, because the body wears down much faster during periods of crisis. The American Institute of Stress investigated this degenerative process and concluded that most health problems are caused by stress.
Prevent stress by practicing mindfulness. One way to reach a state of mindfulness is through meditation, breathing exercises, yoga, and body scans.
While sustained, intense stress is a known enemy of longevity and both mental and physical health, low levels of stress have been shown to be beneficial.
People who maintained a low level of stress, who faced challenges and put their heart and soul into their work in order to succeed, lived longer than those who chose a more relaxed lifestyle and retired earlier.
Spending too much time sitting not only reduces muscular and respiratory fitness but also increases appetite and curbs the desire to participate in activities. Being sedentary can lead to hypertension, imbalanced eating, cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis, and even certain kinds of cancer.
Avoid being sedentary. Here are some simple things that you can do: Walk to work, or just go on a walk for at least twenty minutes each day; climb instead of using the elevator; participate in social or leisure activities so that you don’t spend too much time in front of the television; play with children or pets, or join a sports team; be conscious of your daily routine in order to detect harmful habits and replace them with more positive ones.
Science has shown that sleep is a key antiaging tool, because when we sleep we generate melatonin, a hormone that occurs naturally in our bodies. Melatonin helps us live longer, strengthens the immune system, contains an element that protects against cancer, promotes the natural production of insulin, slows the onset of Alzheimer’s disease, helps prevent osteoporosis and fight heart disease. Melatonin production decreases after age thirty. We can compensate for this by eating a balanced diet and getting more calcium; soaking up a moderate amount of sun each day; getting enough sleep; avoiding stress, alcohol, tobacco, and caffeine.
People who live the longest have two dispositional traits in common: a positive attitude and a high degree of emotional awareness.
In his book Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl cites one of Nietzsche’s famous aphorisms: “He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.” What we need is not a peaceful existence, but a challenge we can strive to meet by applying all the skills at our disposal.
Sunday neurosis, for example, is what happens when, without the obligations and commitments of the workweek, the individual realizes how empty he is inside. He has to find a solution. Above all, he has to find his purpose, his reason for getting out of bed—his ikigai.
We don’t create the meaning of our life, we discover it.
We each have a unique reason for being, which can be adjusted or transformed many times over the years.
Just as worry often brings about precisely the thing that was feared, excessive attention to a desire (or “hyper-intention”) can keep that desire from being fulfilled.
Humor can help break negative cycles and reduce anxiety.
We all have the capacity to do noble or terrible things. The side of the equation we end up on depends on our decisions, not on the condition in which we find ourselves.
Accept your feelings. If we have obsessive thoughts, we should not try to control them or get rid of them. If we do, they become more intense.
Do what you should be doing. Don’t focus on eliminating symptoms, because recovery will come on its own. Focus instead on the present moment, and if you are suffering, accept that suffering.
Discover your life’s purpose. We can’t control our emotions, but we can take charge of our actions every day. The key to achieving this is having dared to look inside yourself to find your ikigai.
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.—Aristotle

The Power of Flow

We’ve all felt our sense of time vanish when we lose ourselves in an activity we enjoy. Focus on increasing the time spent on activities that bring you to this state of flow, rather than allowing yourself to get caught up in activities that offer immediate pleasure—like eating too much, abusing drugs or alcohol, etc. When we flow, we are focused on a concrete task without any distractions. Our mind is “in order.”
Take on tasks that you have a chance of completing but that are slightly outside your comfort zone. Activities that are too easy lead to boredom.
On the other hand, if you take on a task that is too difficult, you won’t have the skills to complete it and will almost certainly give up—and feel frustrated.
Have a clear objective. For example: How many words am I going to write today for the article coming out next month? However, once the journey has begun, we should keep this objective in mind without obsessing over it.
To start the journey towards your objective, start with small steps. It will help you overcome your anxiety and achieve flow.
Concentrate on a single task at a one time. Multi-taskers are the least productive people. Concentrating on one thing at a time may be the single most important factor in achieving flow. Some studies indicate that working on several things at once lowers our productivity by at least 60 percent and our IQ by more than ten points.
Don’t look at any kind of screen for the first hour you’re awake and the last hour before you go to sleep.
Keep your phone on “do not disturb” so only the people closest to you can contact you in case of emergency.
Designate one day of the week, perhaps a Saturday or Sunday, a day of technological “fasting,” making exceptions only for e-readers (without Wi-Fi) or MP3 players.
Read and respond to e-mail only once or twice per day. Define those times clearly and stick to them.
Get yourself a timer and commit to working on a single task as long as it’s running.
Start your work session with a ritual you enjoy and end it with a reward.
Train your mind to return to the present when you find yourself getting distracted. Practice mindfulness or another form of meditation, go for a walk or a swim—whatever will help you get centered again.
Work in a space where you will not be distracted. If you can’t do this at home, go to a library, a café, etc.
Divide each activity into groups of related tasks, and assign each group its own place and time. For example, if you’re writing a magazine article, you could do research and take notes at home in the morning, write in the library in the afternoon, and edit on the couch at night.
Bundle routine tasks—such as sending out invoices, making phone calls, and so on—and do them all at once.
There are artists and scientists all over the world with strong, clear ikigais. They do what they love until their dying day.
Take pleasure in performing routine tasks. Even Bill Gates washes the dishes every night. He says he enjoys it—that it helps him relax and clear his mind, and that he tries to do it a little better each day, following an established order or set of rules he’s made for himself: plates first, forks second, and so on.
Training the mind can get us to a place of flow more quickly. Meditation is one way to exercise our mental muscles. There are many types of meditation, but they all have the same objective: calming the mind, observing our thoughts and emotions, and centering our focus on a single object.
When confronted with a big goal, try to break it down into parts and then attack each part one by one.
Try new things that are not on the list of what makes you flow but that are similar and that you are curious about. For example, if photography is something that drives you into flow, you could also try painting; you might even like it more! Or if you love snowboarding and have never tried surfing . . .
One of the centenarians interviewed said, “I don’t know what the secret to long life is. The only thing I do is I’ve never eaten meat in my life. I attribute it to that.”
Another centenarian interviewed had a sense of humor, which could be the secret to her longevity. As she said on her 120th birthday, “I see badly, I hear badly, and I feel bad, but everything’s fine.”
Another centenarian interviewed had a habit of helping others, and he wasn’t afraid of dying. As he declared, “We’re all going to die. Some people are scared of dying. Never be afraid to die. Because you’re born to die.”
Art, in all its forms, is an ikigai that can bring happiness and purpose to our days. Enjoying or creating beauty is free, and something all human beings have access to.
Never Stop Learning- “You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then—to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.”—T. H. White, The Once and Future King
A peaceful life in the countryside seems pretty common among people who have watched a century pass.
An interviewee said, “Food won’t help you live longer, the secret is smiling and having a good time.”
In addition to playing and celebrating as a community, spirituality is also essential for happiness and longevity.
Do everything with a sense of calm. Always pursue your ikigai, but never be in a rush.
Interviewee: “The secret to a long life is not to worry. And to keep your heart young—don’t let it grow old. Open your heart to people with a nice smile on your face. If you smile and open your heart, your grandchildren and everyone else will want to see you.”
Interviewee: “The best way to avoid anxiety is to go out in the street and say hello to people. I do it every day. I go out there and say, ‘Hello!’ and ‘See you later!’
Interviewee: “Here, everyone gets along. We try not to cause problems. Spending time together and having fun is the only thing that matters.”
Interviewee: “The key to staying sharp in old age is in your fingers. From your fingers to your brain, and back again. If you keep your fingers busy, you’ll live to see one hundred.”
Interviewee: “To live a long time you need to do three things: exercise to stay healthy, eat well, and spend time with people.”
Interviewee: “My secret to a long life is always saying to myself, ‘Slow down,’ and ‘Relax.’ You live much longer if you’re not in a hurry.”
Interviewee: “Doing many different things every day. Always staying busy, but doing one thing at a time, without getting overwhelmed.”
Interviewee: “I do volunteer work to give back to the village a bit of what it has given to me. For example, I use my car to help friends get to the hospital.”

THE IKIGAI DIET – What the world’s longest-living people eat and drink

Eat a wide variety of foods, especially vegetables. Variety seems to be key. A study of Okinawa’s centenarians showed that they ate 206 different foods, including spices, on a regular basis. They ate an average of eighteen different foods each day, a striking contrast to the nutritional poverty of our fast-food culture.
They eat at least five servings of fruits and vegetables every day. At least seven types of fruits and vegetables are consumed by Okinawans on a daily basis. The easiest way to check if there is enough variety on your table is to make sure you’re “eating the rainbow.” A table featuring red peppers, carrots, spinach, cauliflower, and eggplant, for example, offers great color and variety.
Vegetables, potatoes, legumes, and soy products such as tofu are the staples of an Okinawan’s diet. More than 30 percent of their daily calories comes from vegetables.
Grains are the foundation of their diet. Japanese people eat white rice every day, sometimes adding noodles.
They rarely eat sugar, and if they do, it’s sugarcane.
Okinawans eat fish an average of three times per week.
They consume very little salt.
Low caloric intake is common among them.
Fast for one or two days each week. The 5:2 (or fasting) diet recommends two days of fasting (consuming fewer than five hundred calories) every week and eating normally on the other five days. Among its many benefits, fasting helps cleanse the digestive system and allows it to rest.
These fifteen foods are considered keys to Okinawan vitality: Tofu; Miso; Tuna; Carrots; Goya (bitter melon); Kombu (sea kelp); Cabbage; Nori (seaweed); Onion; Soy sprouts; Hechima (cucumber-like gourd); Soybeans (boiled or raw); Sweet potato; Peppers; Sanpin-cha (jasmine tea)
The benefits of jasmine tea are: Reducing the risk of heart attack; Strengthening the immune system; Helping relieve stress; Lowering cholesterol.
White tea, with its high concentration of polyphenols, may be even more effective against aging. In fact, it is considered to be the natural product with the greatest antioxidant power in the world.
All citrus fruits—grapefruits, oranges, lemons—are high in nobiletin a flavonoid rich in antioxidants), but Okinawa’s shikuwasas have forty times as much as oranges. Consuming nobiletin has been proven to protect us from arteriosclerosis, cancer, type 2 diabetes, and obesity in general. Shikuwasas also contain vitamins C and B1, beta carotene, and minerals.
Here is a list of foods recommended by experts to combat aging – Vegetables such as broccoli and chard, for their high concentration of water, minerals, and fiber; Oily fish such as salmon, mackerel, tuna, and sardines, for all the antioxidants in their fat; Fruits such as citrus, strawberries, and apricots; they are an excellent source of vitamins and help eliminate toxins from the body; Berries such as blueberries and goji berries; they are rich in phytochemical antioxidants; Dried fruits, which contain vitamins and antioxidants, and give you energy; Grains such as oats and wheat, which give you energy and contain minerals; Olive oil, for its antioxidant effects that show in your skin; Red wine, in moderation, for its antioxidant and vasodilatory properties.
Foods that should be eliminated are refined sugar and grains, processed baked goods, and prepared foods, along with cow’s milk and all its derivatives.

Exercises that promote health and longevity

The people who live longest are not the ones who do the most exercise but rather the ones who move the most.
Metabolism slows down 90 percent after 30 minutes of sitting. The enzymes that move the bad fat from your arteries to your muscles, where it can get burned off, slow down. And after two hours, good cholesterol drops 20 percent. Just getting up for five minutes is going to get things going again.
Yoga—originally from India, though very popular in Japan—and China’s qigong and tai chi, among other disciplines, seek to create harmony between a person’s body and mind so they can face the world with strength, joy, and serenity.
You don’t need to go to the gym for an hour every day or run marathons. All you need is to add movement to your day.
Radio taiso is a morning warm-up has been around since before World War II. The exercises take five or ten minutes, depending on whether you do all or only some of them. They focus on dynamic stretching and increasing joint mobility. One of the most iconic radio taiso exercises consists of simply raising mobility. One of the most iconic radio taiso exercises consists of simply raising your arms above your head and then bringing them down in a circular motion. It is a tool to wake up the body, an easy mobility workout that is low in intensity and that focuses on exercising as many joints as possible.

Yoga: The main objectives of yoga are: To bring us closer to our (human) nature; Mental and physical purification; To bring us closer to the divine.
The Sun Salutation (Surya Namaskar) is one of the most iconic exercises in hatha yoga.
Tai chi, also known as t’ai chi ch’uan (or taijiquan), is a Chinese martial art that can be traced back hundreds of years to Buddhism and Confucianism.
One of the best-known movements in tai chi consists of following the form of clouds in an exercise called Wave Hands Like Clouds.
Qigong involves static and dynamic physical exercises that stimulate respiration in a standing, seated, or reclined position. There are many different styles of qigong, but all of them seek to strengthen and regenerate qi (life force or energy). Though its movements are typically gentle, the practice is intense.
Qigong offers significant health benefits such as– Modification of brain waves; Improved balance of sex hormones; Lower mortality rate from heart attacks; Lower blood pressure in patients with hypertension; Greater bone density; Better circulation; Deceleration of symptoms associated with senility; Greater balance and efficiency of bodily functions; Increased blood flow to the brain and greater mind-body connection; Improved cardiac function; Reduction in the secondary effects of cancer treatments.
One of the best known Qigong exercises is a series representing the five elements: earth, water, wood, metal, and fire. This series of movements seeks to balance the five currents of energy in order to improve brain and organ function.
Shiatsu is used for the treatment of arthritis and also works on energy flow through the application of pressure with the thumbs and the palms of the hands. In combination with stretching and breathing exercises, it seeks to create equilibrium among the different elements of the body.
Use Six Healing Sounds to bring your soul to a place of calm. These are: Xu, pronounced like “shh” with a deep sigh, which is associated with the liver; He, pronounced like “her” with a yawn, which is associated with the heart; Si, pronounced like “sir” with a slow exhale, which is associated with the lungs; Chui, pronounced like “chwee” with a forceful exhale, which is associated with the kidneys; Hoo, pronounced like “who,” which is associated with the spleen; Xi, pronounced like “she, ” which connects the whole body.

How to face life’s challenges without letting stress and worry age you

Resilience is our ability to deal with setbacks. The more resilient we are, the easier it will be to pick ourselves up and get back to what gives meaning to our lives.
Worrying about things that are beyond our control accomplishes nothing. We should have a clear sense of what we can change and what we can’t, which in turn will allow us to resist giving in to negative emotions.
The present (not the past or the future) is all that exists, and it is the only thing we can control.
Never forget that everything we have and all the people we love will disappear at some point. This is something we should keep in mind, but without giving in to pessimism. Being aware of the impermanence of things does not have to make us sad; it should help us love the present moment and those who surround us.
Anti-fragile is a word used for things that get stronger when harmed (up to a point).
Here’s how we can be more anti-fragile–
Create redundancies: Instead of having a single salary, try to find a way to make money from your hobbies, at other jobs, or by starting your own business. If you have only one salary, you might be left with nothing should your employer run into trouble, leaving you in a position of fragility. On the other hand, if you have several options and you lose your primary job, it might just happen that you end up dedicating more time to your secondary job, and maybe even make more money at it. You would have beaten that stroke of bad luck and would be, in that case, antifragile.
Bet conservatively in certain areas and take many smallrisks in others: If you have $10,000 saved up, you might put $9,000 of that into an index fund or fixed term deposit, and invest the remaining $1,000 in ten start-ups with huge growth potential—say, $100 in each. One possible scenario is that three of the companies fail (you lose $300), the value of three other companies goes down (you lose another $100 or $200), the value of three goes up (you make $100 or $200), and the value of one of the startups increases twenty-fold (you make nearly $2,000, or maybe even more). You still make money, even if three of the businesses go completely belly-up.
Get rid of the things that make you fragile: Ask yourself: What makes me fragile? For example: Stop snacking between meals; Eat sweets only once a week; Gradually pay off all debt; Avoid spending time with toxic people; Avoid spending time doing things we don’t enjoy, simply because we feel obligated to do them; Spend no more than twenty minutes on Facebook per day.
To build resilience into our lives, we shouldn’t fear adversity, because each setback is an opportunity for growth. If we adopt an antifragile attitude, we’ll find a way to get stronger with every blow, refining our lifestyle and staying focused on our ikigai.
Our intuition and curiosity are very powerful internal compasses to help us connect with our ikigai. Follow those things you enjoy, and get away from or change those you dislike. Be led by your curiosity, and keep busy by doing things that fill you with meaning and happiness. It doesn’t need to be a big thing: we might find meaning in being good parents or in helping our neighbors.
Just remember to have something that keeps you busy doing what you love while being surrounded by the people who love you.

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Disclaimer: The key points of the book presented here are not a substitute for reading the book. To get the entire holistic message the author has offered requires reading the book.