HOW TO cultivate Contentment
It’s Not a Simple Life You’re Seeking
We live in a world in which we’re taught that more is better. That we should keep working, to keep pushing, to do more bigger and better. We’ve been taught that we should strive in pursuit of happiness. But what if the western focus on happiness isn’t even the right focus?
Over the last few years we’ve seen an interesting rise in the counter-cultural pursuit of simplicity. Rather than striving for more, bigger, better we’ve seen a growth in the number of people looking to live a simpler life, to have less, to be more deliberate in how they use their resources. But the simple life is a misnomer. We’re not really striving for simplicity. It would be much simpler for me to live in a house in the city with minimal lawn and buy my meat entirely from the supermarket. That would be simpler in that it would be less work and throw fewer curve-balls my way. Many of us didn’t grow up living a simple life and have had to learn an immense amount along the way, that’s certainly far from simple.
A ‘simple life’ isn’t necessarily simple at all. In fact it can be an awful lot of work to live ‘simply’ and it certainly comes with its ups and downs. Anybody who has had an animal escape it’s paddock or tried to grow their own crops can attest to the variety of challenges that a simple life brings. The simple life is full of adventures and misadventures. But living simply isn’t meant to be about cultivating an ‘easy’ life. It’s about creating a life in which we can be genuinely content.
So if we’re not seeking ‘more’ and we’re not seeking simplicity. What are we actually seeking? I believe that what we are really craving is contentment.
As Daniel Cordaro, Ph.D., founder and CEO of the Contentment Foundation, tells us, there are 2 strategies that humans have utilised for millennia in their pursuit of the better life. One is the ‘more’ strategy – the approach that tells us that if we just buy more, have more, do more we will be happy. The other is the ‘enough’ strategy. The strategy that tells us that we should look within ourselves to develop a sense of ‘wellness’. That’s not to say that we never aim to improve or to challenge ourselves. Contentment isn’t something that comes to us from outside, it’s something that we develop within ourselves, and it’s something that we can consciously cultivate.
What can we do to cultivate contentment?
That’s all well and good to say that we should be seeking contentment. But that’s a pretty abstract notion. How, at a practical level, do we actually do that? Well here a 4 concrete practices you can incorporate into your day that will help you find contentment in your life. None of them need to cost anything or take any time. In fact they’re likely to save you both time and money. So where to from here?
1. Practise Mindfulness
2. Cultivate Gratitude
3. Be conscious in your media use
4. Implement a purchase list
Practice Mindfulness
Mindfulness can be another one of those ideas that comes across as a bit ‘woo woo’ at first. But interestingly the research consistently shows us that practicing mindfulness, or related habits such as meditation, is one the single best things we can do for our health. And practicing mindfulness doesn’t need to be elaborate or expensive.
I speak to this one from personal experience. Prior to having my first child I took a mindfulness course and was taught some basic techniques to help myself be more mindful. In the decade since then I’ve drawn on those practices many times. We all have those moments where life can feel like a lot. Simple mindfulness practices can help us to navigate those times and find contentment even in the challenging times. My first baby didn’t sleep well so I would be out there without fail every afternoon pushing her in her pram so that she would sleep. I vividly remember being out there one miserable rainy winter day and literally the only other person I saw out walking was another mother pushing her own baby in a pram, doing exactly the same thing that I was. In those moments something as simple as focusing on your own footsteps can help you to centre yourself. Mindfulness doesn’t need to be elaborate; it doesn’t even need to take any time. It can be as simple as focusing on the sensations of what you’re doing.
Practising Gratitude
To be honest when I first came across the concept of actively practicing gratitude it felt a bit ‘out there’ and naff to me. Yes, of course I’m grateful for the life I lead. Do I really need to do anything to practice it?
Then I conducted a little experiment on myself (afterall I love a good experiment). As I was driving, when I came up to a traffic light that was green I would thank the light for being green and carry on my way. It sounds a bit ridiculous right, thanking a light for being green. Afterall, the light couldn’t’ care less what I think of it. As I thanked more lights for being green I seemed to get more green lights when driving and my trips seemed to flow more smoothly as a result.
Sounds pretty ‘airy fairy’ right, it’s not as if I have any control over the lights. And that’s true, I don’t. But what I do have control over is what I choose to turn my attention to. I can’t alter the number of green lights I encounter, but I can alter my own perception of how many I encounter.
Human psychology is a fascinating thing. We think that we’re rational beings working logically with the information in front of us. But actually our minds have all sorts of short cuts that they naturally rely on. We can’t possibly take in all the information that we’re exposed to in our lives. And so our brains have evolved to filter out a lot of information and only draw to our attention the things that seem to matter. If you’ve ever seen the video of te basketball game with the gorilla you’ll know what I mean. It’s amazing what our brains can overlook.
The flipside of this is that if we choose to consciously draw attention to something we can alter our own perception of that thing. Thanking the traffic lights for being green doesn’t mean I encounter more green lights, but it means that I feel like I’m encountering more green lights. The facts haven’t changed, but my perception of the situation has. That’s a simple example, but throughout our days we have a choice of what we focus on. We can’t necessarily change what is happening, but we can deliberately alter our own perception of it.
Conscious Media Consumption
In building a content life it’s hugely important that we are conscious of our media use. Afterall, marketing 101 tells us that in order to sell a product we need the buyer to believe that it will improve their life.
There’s been an interesting evolution in marketing since its early inception in printed and broadcast media. In the past marketing tended to focus more practical values of the product being sold. If you look at advertisements from the 1950s you’ll find them promoting the value of stainless steel for an easy clean kitchen, or the fact that this new refrigerator doesn’t need defrosting. In contrast, if you look at modern advertisements for similar products you’ll see a stark change in the headlines. These advertisements don’t focus on the practical features of the product being sold. Instead they focus on selling you a dream, a vision of what you’re life could be like if you had this product. With taglines emphasizing how we want our kitchens to be “a place we love to spend time cooking, gathering, entertaining”. They lead with creating a vision, and then selling their product as a way to attain that.
It’s for this reason that we need to be careful and conscious of our own media consumption. That’s not to say that marketing is inherently ‘bad’ but we do need to be aware of it. We all logically know that buying a new refrigerator isn’t going to magically make our kitchen a place of shared familial joy. But it’s easy to fall into that marketing rabbit hole and be sold that vision.
Use a Purchase List
A really practical step we can take to foster contentment (and save ourselves money) is to use a purchase list. The idea is that when we’re looking to buy something, rather than immediately buying it we put it on the list and wait a while. Some people like to wait 48 hours, some like to wait a month. That decision is over to you. Bu the point is to put some distance between the impulse to buy and the actual act of buying.
I’ve been using a purchase list for years. Most things stay on my list for at least a week. Some stay on there for months, as something that I would still like to buy eventually but for which there’s no real rush. However, after many years of doing this I’ve found that only about half the things that go on the list ever actually end up getting bought at all. Sometimes, after putting something on the list I’ll realise that I can actually use something that I already have instead. Or I’ll realise that I no longer want it afterall. Putting some time between the initial impulse to buy and the actual purchase allows us to distance ourselves from the pull of marketing and the vision it’s selling and make a more rational purchasing decision.
Seek Contentment in Your Everyday
If we allow our feeling of contentment to be conditional on external factors then we will always be striving. There will always be something else we can reach for. The path will stretch our in a never ending line in front of us. That’s not to say that we should never stretch ourselves to aim to achieve anything new. But we can’t leave our feeling of contentment resting on that, instead we should consciously cultivate contentment in ourselves. Finding your space to thrive is as much about cultivating your inner life as your outer life.