Meaning and Purpose

All Time High

Hopefully this text will encourage you to take that leap of faith, start eating better, moving more, protecting your sleep, and intentionally reaching out to others. My hope is that you give these things a try, and they start to change your life for the better. I want you to feel more energized, think more clearly, and perform better in life.

Yet, you might be asking yourself, what’s the point? TMWD nutrition and lifestyle guidance may help you feel and function better or relieve mood and anxiety issues. But then depression may step in and tell you that it wouldn’t make any sense to try to improve brain function. It might try to tell you something super negative, like “you’re not worth it.” Or, depression may try to convince you that all you’d do with that extra brain power is just attack yourself harder, so “what’s the point?”. Anxiety might pipe up and try to tell you that it’s just too late for you. Anxiety will tell you “it’s not gonna work,” and besides, “change is scary!”. ADHD may drive you straight to the back of the book to see the recipe section, and then after a quick glance tell you that “it all seems like a lot of work... pass.”

Discovering a higher purpose is essential final step in TMWD. It’s the safeguard against these mental illness symptoms that try to get you to give up. It’s the odd experience being of two parts. Part of us wants to feel well. Another part is scared. But the scared part doesn’t make the brave, hopeful part fully vanish. Diet always starts Monday, am I right? With a strong purpose, something greater than yourself, you may be more likely to keep the discipline, organization, and forward momentum going by Friday. Hopefully, when you’re fighting for something bigger, you’ll be better able to keep up these good habits. It’s amazing the things we would do for others that we wouldn’t do for ourselves, right?

The highest aim of TMWD is to help you sever the mental and emotional anchors that are pulling you down. Some of those anchors are nutritional, some are mental, some are emotional. What do you think is preventing you from reaching your highest potential? Are there physical ailments? Is it brain fog? Are painful emotional states weighing you down? Is it self-doubt based on a series of past failures (real or perceived)?

The premise of this book is that following the wisdom plucked from traditional cultures (and now backed by science) will help you live a better life. It’s about what we need to eat to fuel our brain – the organ most responsible for how we feel and perform. Although, if you haven’t noticed already, this book that’s allegedly about nutrition has a lot of touchy-feely sentiments scattered throughout. Coming from the field of mental health, perhaps this was unavoidable. In my life, I’ve been accused of being an over-analyzer, but who else would write a book like this? Remember how every perceived weakness is paired with a complimentary strength? Now you see how that works?

However, when we think about it, our experiences, thoughts, reflections, feelings, and interactions with others are all inputs into the system. The same is true with all of our food choices. Life is one giant assembly line conveyor belt, and we are the factories. We can’t just have a great diet but not pay attention to the other inputs (stress, relationships, sleep, movement, etc.) and expect to remain mentally well. Once our diet is in order, we need good sunlight, a stress management plan, good sleep, movement, a community to belong to... and that extra something in our life that helps us want to get out of bed in the morning. That extra something is meaning and purpose.

All of the guidance in TMWD aims to lift you up so that you can, in turn, do more for yourself and others. Why else would we go through the trouble of wolfing down organ meats, staring into the sun until our eyes burn first thing in the morning, and passing on late night TV binge with guilty pleasure snack sessions? We do it for love. Hopefully, for the love for ourselves. More likely, it’s for the love we have for the people in our lives, the ones that benefit from all that we do.

If you feel disconnected from family, or feel like you have no friends, or can’t relate to the concept of a ‘support system’, hope is not lost. You do have value. You are worth it. There is space for you’re here. Everyone has something to offer. You just need to discover what that gift is for you. Again, a big part of your value lies in your unique ways of seeing the world. That one-of-a-kind perspective is your undeniable gift to the rest of us. You will show the rest of us that one particular angle that the rest of us do not readily see. We will be better for it. We just have to get to know you first.

All great news comes with a catch. So, here’s a warning. If you follow the TMWD, eat well, take care of your body and mind, and find your purpose, all of this will not make life easier. In life, we put in the work and we become quicker, stronger, smarter, better. Then a strange thing happens. Once we become better at a certain skill, gain comfort with managing our tasks, or feel more confident in handling all of our responsibilities, life just tosses us ever greater challenges. Our only option then is to continue to try and overcome. It’s endless. It’s also a good thing. The good news is that this never-ending mountain climb is beneficial for our mental health. Living to our fullest potential is a journey, not a destination. Although we may never arrive at the fantastical places we imagined in our minds, the act of striving is an essential feature of being human.^111–112

How can we be striving if we are so weighed down with mental illness? It will be harder for sure. It won’t work until we address what needs to be addressed. So the goal of TMWD is to no longer feel yourself dragging through the days, no longer feel trapped in cycles of negativity in your mind, no longer feel like you have to hide the fact that a dense fog has taken your brain offline and sapped your joy. We can start with food and our lifestyle habits. Then we have to face our fears and insecurities. Then we have to keep going to find out what makes us tick.

Don’t Hide & Go Seek

The human brain was designed with another important feature. It’s always seeking. The tendency to seek, to always be on the hunt so to speak, helped us survive. We needed to be oriented towards reward seeking and risk taking in order to survive and thrive. It was, and still is, a requirement for survival. Mating, hunting, fighting/fleeing, befriending, cooperating, and mating again were how humans lived for centuries. Unfortunately, as civilization progressed, the landscape changed, and physical challenges were replaced with more complex and insidious psychological ones.

Nowadays, we don’t need to hunt, or even really need to get out of our cars to obtain food... so we don’t. Feeling accepted as a member of a group seems more challenging nowadays compared to our tight knit tribal ancestors who relied upon each other daily for survival. In place of those primal threats, we now face modern-day plagues. These include big bureaucracies, office politics, implicit and explicit biases, pervasive images of beautifully fit people, the geographic spreading out of families, and the aforementioned perils of exceptionalism. Life surely has changed. Our brain configuration has not. The reward pathways that drove us towards survival, reproduction, and group cohesion are still there. It’s just that these rewards pathways in our brains have been commandeered by modern-day life. These reward pathways now seem to be occupied with different aims, ones that take more from us than they give back to us.

In the context of a fast and furious, relatively safe (clearly not safe for everyone), modern-day life, we have developed the bad habit of seeking instant gratification. Not all instant gratification is bad, but most is. All of us can easily begin to lean on, or gravitate towards, instant gratifications a bit too much.

Alternatively, you may actually be the kind of person that feels allergic to instant gratification. You may be very fearful of it or worried that if you ever let up off the throttle (on hard work and discipline), you’ll fall into immediate destitution for the remainder of your life. Sounds dramatic, but this fear is very real for many of us in modern-day life. If you constantly focus on putting resources into your future and never stop to have fun, then obviously you are geared more towards delayed gratification.

Neither of these extremes serve us well. We are human beings. We are programmed to seek out things that feel good, or we think are good for us. Our brains are fine tuned to seek rewards. Sometimes instant gratification is okay, even a good thing. The problem is that our choices can be easily misguided in modern-day life. On the delayed gratification side, those rewards could be the high flying accomplishments, important persons status, or the accumulation of wealth. On the instant gratification end, it could be hyperpalatable food, drugs, excessive sexual partners, expensive things, or any other hedonistic pleasure that you instinctively lie about to your primary care physician during your yearly check-up.

Moderation and balance are key. It’s okay to dabble in both instant and delayed gratification. Sticking solely or rigidly to just one or the other is hazardous to your mental health. Moving towards something in life that has a greater and longer lasting meaning is important. Working towards something bigger than yourself in life can help us avoid the pitfalls of both instant and delayed gratification. Meaning and purpose are more balanced, medium-speed gratification.

Striving towards something bigger can be grueling and the payoff is often delayed somewhat. But it can also be kinda fun and thrilling. Possibly, the trick is to try to seek instant gratification within the bigger delayed gratification projects. Little wins on the way to the big win can feel good, and keep us going if we let them. We just have to learn to be okay with accomplishing big things in small steps over time. Sometimes, it’s the unfinished business that’s the good business to be in.

The seeking involved in dedicating ourselves to some higher purpose is as good for us as it is for those who benefit from our efforts. For us, it can help to move us away from depressed or anxious thoughts, negative self-assessments, and feelings of emptiness. In all fairness, striving towards a higher purpose can be a good distraction. Beyond those temporary gains, striving towards a higher purpose can satisfy our deep-rooted need to seek out and experience reward. And this seeking is neither selfish and impulsive, nor prudish and deathly boring. Remember, seeking is human. We are going to be seeking in life whether we like it or not. Without a solid meaning and purpose to our lives, we are bound to get into trouble one way or another. Or worse, we may just drift, lost at sea, headed in no direction in particular. Meaning and purpose will breathe life into your daily existence. Therefore, meaning and purpose should also be considered essential daily nutrients.

4 Step Guide to Finding Greater Purpose

1. Start with the negative. Think about what makes you uncomfortable, upset, or just plain emotional. Is it starving children? Is it mistreated animals? Do you wish there was better help out there for people dealing with the same problems afflicting you or your family members?

2. Think about how you could help yourself feel more comfortable with that issue. What can you do to try and change things? If you donated to charities that fed starving children, that might be a start. If you volunteered time taking care of shelter animals, you might find that you’re onto something. If you went back to school to learn more about how to help others like yourself or your family members, that might lead to a big change in how you feel about life and how you feel about yourself.

3. Whichever issue strikes a chord for you, try to find a challenge related to that issue. Make sure this challenge isn’t something mastered quickly or easily. It’s best if your purpose is a challenge that is impossible to master, something that may never be fully finished or accomplished. Think of the obsession some teens have for skateboarding, or the allure of golf for old guys. There’s no perfect score in either of these endeavors. With a clear purpose, you will never be finished mastering your skill. There will always be more that can be done, improved upon, or perfected. Although it sounds counterintuitive, your work can never be finished. This is a key element of one’s meaning and purpose in life. As mentioned above, there is a certain kind of safety that comes with the never-ending nature of life’s challenges. It’s not going anywhere, and neither are you. For many that can feel safe and fulfilling.

4. Finally, the meaning and purpose you choose will best serve you if it forces you to go against the grain. Doing something that someone else (or everyone else) is doing, won’t give you that same feeling. It needs to feel lonely. It should also scare you a bit. You will, however, persist. No one without your passion would want the job. That makes it all yours. Since no one else dares to try, it’s only up to you to get it done. This solo quest can help inform your reason for existence, which also may help us feel safe and more at peace.