Designing the Space that Becomes Our Wellbeing

To help us conceptualize one way of thinking about the design process as it relates to our wellbeing—and thus, our Wellbeing Equation, let’s take a page from interior design

Say we are going to design “a living-room”, both in reality and in psychological abstraction, and want to think about how we go about putting the room we will live in together. We can add comfortable chairs and a couch that seats three and situate them in relation to a central focal point that ties the room together, say a fireplace, TV or specific view of the outdoors. We could designate a play space, with games, exercise equipment or hobby related paraphernalia. Add speakers and a sound-system for listening to music, book shelves and a coffee table for eating and a reading space. We could add colorful accent rugs to sit on hardwood floors, add artwork that has personal meaning and hang pictures that speak to us and paint the walls with warm colors that make the room feel warm and inviting. We could add layered and colored lighting with dimming functions that allows us to change the feel and ambiance of the room to fit the function we would like the room to have and finish it off with decorative plants to help tie the room together.

In the situation described, the living-room is designed in a way that makes the room feel inviting so that we feel that we’d want to spend time in it even if it wasn’t ours. That the room somehow makes us feel better when we are in it as it fits us. And why wouldn’t it fit us? We designed it after all or maybe we didn’t design it, and just maybe, it designed us or more aptly impacts our mood in ways we prefer—or don’t prefer. And thus we could “decorate” the room in a diametrically opposed manner and fashion the room with items that are uncomfortable and undesirable to use and spend time in.

For myself, this would be a room filled with wicker chairs and we could leave the rest of the room empty with not enough light or too bright of light that feels harsh with loud buzzing noises emanating from them. The room designed in a way that makes the room feel cold, empty and uninviting. Fill the room with too many knick knacks and overcrowd it with too many things in a haphazard way that makes us feel anxious and stuck. The furniture ends up blocking off natural walkways and we can’t walk around the room without bumping into something. We begin to worry if we do walk around the room we’ll end up breaking something. We’ve all been in rooms that have poor Feng Shui that contribute to us feeling off, anxious, or irritated. Rooms that feel uninviting as if they were designed to make us want to leave them.

In the example, and analogy of creating our own living by design, the living-rooms create different atmospheres and indicate the time-thought-experiential in their arrangement was vastly different. Meaning, it takes time and thought to develop the feel and aesthetic we are looking to create—“a living room of wellbeing”. That is unless we’re going about our room with the latter design, in haphazard fashion paying little mind to the emotional-experiential price we pay to live and spend time in it. And what happens if the design process is tied to and “modeled” after a chaotic, stressful and depressing emotional experience we carry around with us from childhood?

Meaning, “the living-room”—and thus our wellbeing—gets designed in relation to a chaotic childhood environment that we haven’t processed. In this scenario, the problem of living equation—occurs in which we don’t recognize how and why it is that we go about designing our lives in the fashion we have and how doing so impacts our wellbeing and the quality of our existence. The design process, or lack thereof, that we’ve used is tied to a past of emotionally troubling experiences that we’d prefer not think about and perhaps even find ways of telling ourselves that we’ve moved on from when our emotions and way we are living our life conveys otherwise. In other words, how we live our life, that the room design analogy conveys, is that we construct our lives in such a fashion that it isn’t tied to our wellbeing but tied to a past that is chaotic and traumatic. Thus, we haven’t given ourself the proper time and respect we need to grow and develop into something and someone that is healthy and that we enjoy.

Let’s move back to thinking about our wellbeing while keeping in mind the time-thought-experiential differential between the design of the two rooms. Which room would you rather live in and more importantly in regard to the living-room analogy which room are you living in at the moment? Most people would prefer to emotionally live in the space that takes time to think about how the room is constructed and when it’s pulled together it produces a well put together feel. In other words, to live in and in relation to a healthy well thought out, well designed, put together internal space can contribute to us feeling that we ourselves are better put together and living out a well thought through put together life. While there are limits to the analogy of living room spaces we design and choose to live in that I am putting forth, the analogy has merit in regards to the type of wellbeing many of us are “choosing” to design or not design and live out on a daily basis.

What I’m raising in relation to our Wellbeing Equation(s) and analogy of design scenario is that a well put together room, which can be thought of and experienced as an external representation of our internal wellbeing space, in which we explore our wellbeing, if “properly designed” contributes to a feeling of us being well put together. Further, to be able design such a space dedicated to our wellbeing requires a certain type of presence of mind that hopefully we can begin to cultivate and use in order to explore and enjoy being in the presence of as we continue our wellbeing journey herein. To be more specific, to pull off a well constructed mental-emotional—living space—or life within us that carries an experiential feel of our wellbeing requires the presence of mind to think about and play around with the design process of one’s life. A mindset that takes time to develop, to learn how to enjoy playing around with that entails an ever evolving understanding of how to put our mind to use for our benefit.

Our process of daily living doesn’t happen by chance and hopefully it allows us to move forward in our lives in ways we prefer that are also healthy and connects us to ourselves in ways we find nourishing and enjoyable. In this regard, we want to have an understanding of how to combine a mixture of structure and balance in our lives that helps produce and contribute to a type of quality of living often described in the psychology and self-help or pop psychology literature as wellbeing, authentic happiness, flourishing, enjoyment, peace of mind, health, pleasure or flow.

After all, there is an inborn instinctual urge within us, under certain conditions, to care for and nurture young children and yet at the same time we all go about the care of each other and ourselves in different ways. Thus, it helps if we can learn how to be curious about and learn how we go about incorporating our natural inclination to care for others and put our adaptive abilities towards caring for ourselves and the facets of our beings that need nurturing. In this sense, is it not the moral imperative of life itself to learn how to spend time nurturing and connecting with those activities of living that improve and increase our wellbeing? I would argue we do and why it is so important that we are in the midst of exploring what our Wellbeing Equation consists of and be able to use it for helping ourselves design our lives for wellbeing.

In addition to our inborn instinctual urge for care and nurturance, we also have other instincts such as a desire for freedom, self-determination, to know and be known and to be seen and heard for who we are below the surface of ordinary living and have a drive for knowledge and learning that promotes growth and development. We are also biologically driven in relation to self-exploration and expression centered around fun, enjoyment and contemplation. This innate drive for self-exploration contributes to a child’s natural ability to learn and play that exists from the child’s inception. Thus, in regard to human design as it relates to our mental equations of living and our strivings for wellbeing, our nature asks us to learn how to mix and balance these adaptive instincts together and put them to use towards figuring out over time not only who we are but also how we use this knowledge to help us go about crafting our lives, our wellbeing and better versions of ourself.

In this way of thinking, we might ask ourselves how healthy aspects of play and thought influence our present day equations of living for if they do not are we really enjoying ourselves in the process of our day to day lives and are we in the process of creating and enjoying our wellbeing? Here, we might ask ourselves how do we learn how to listen to ourselves below the surface of everyday thought and action and understand the type of “living-rooms” we are living in and for what purposes? Because if we are not living in relation to our wellbeing than what other living-room space are we creating and for what purpose? This is where spending time creating and spending time in our holding space dedicated to the design of our wellbeing becomes paramount.

Exploring What Our Wellbeing Consists of in Our Wellbeing Holding Space

Before proceeding further, I’m going to ask you to think about how you are going about your life particularly if you are struggling with difficult emotions and stressors that can impact the quality of our living in negative ways. We often catch sight of this in relation to how many of us approach our wellbeing. We may have a nice enough house, a sturdy car, a solid committed relationship or marriage, good kids, a decent enough job, some money put away in a college or retirement fund and go on vacations that we look forward to once or twice a year. On the surface of things by outward appearances life is going pretty well and yet as we carry out our day to day lives we notice we don’t feel all that excited about doing so and we don’t feel all that into our lives—or even ourselves for that matter. This experience of what is sometimes called “going through the motions” of living and not feeling happy or connected to ourselves in ways that feel meaningful to us is more common than we might think—though pop culture and the modern technological age will try to tell us otherwise.

If we ask ourselves why we aren’t happy we might respond by saying “Nobody is happy all the time!”, which is certainly true enough. However, if we go a bit further and ask ourselves when was the last time we truly felt happy and excited to get out bed in the morning many of us have a hard time remembering when this was. And if we do it is often way back in our childhoods in the nether regions of yesteryear.

So we go on with our lives telling ourselves we’ll be happy at some unknown point down the road in our not yet lived out future. We’ll be happy when we pay off our mortgage or our student loans. When our boss retires or when the kids move out on their own or when we get that raise.

What more often than not happens is we busy ourselves with planning for our future—pay off the debt, get that better job, get married, have kids, get the big screen TV and then we will be happy. In other words, we learn how to plan for our future by putting time and energy into living out the American Dream as it were. But with all the important matters we attend to in our busy lives how many of us plan for the “here and now” and in this way of thinking plan and design for our Wellbeing—right here right now—lived out in this very moment?

Related, a central organizing question that life periodically asks us, particularly if we are struggling with our emotional health and/or physical wellbeing, is whether or not there is some easier way(s) for us humans to live out happier lives? Can we learn to feel a bit happier in our daily lives, heal from our “psychological wounds” that life often brings us and not have to struggle and suffer to the degree we do? This question is what I help people explore, grapple with and end up playing around with in different ways in the time they spend with me talking about themselves and the struggles they encounter in life. It’s a question I’m passionate about and have committed my life to helping myself and others better understand how it is that we all go about answering it in the various different idiosyncratic ways that we live out our lives.

I’m lucky in that I love my “day job” and in a younger day before having to wrestle with a few of life’s economic burdens, I would’ve done what I do for a living for free no questions asked. It’s been over three decades since I started my journey of helping others answer this question and I can honestly say doing so, both in relation to the people who come to see and in my own life, is the hardest and second most rewarding part of my day. What’s the most rewarding part of my day? The best part of my day is being out in nature and going on a hike which I do for the most part 365 days of the year. The irony is that I joke with myself and my loved ones saying that what I do for a living is probably the one thing in my life that I am truly good at, that I’m passionate about and yet the rest of my life often feels a bit “messy.”

I go to Mel to grapple with my aforementioned messiness and discuss with him, in my personal wellbeing holding space, what I think my wellbeing equation(s) consists of, what my wellbeing feels like when I’m able to create it and more importantly what I have to do to bring it into existence by design and when it’s absent explore why this is and what I can do to bring it back into existence. In essence, I meet with Mel so that I have a holding space to play around with and discuss how I’m going about my life and how I’ve managed to design it in the ways that I have. This may seem like a strange concept—designing your life—but ask yourself if you aren’t actively designing your life on a daily basis than who is and how often do you come in contact with a day in which you feel happy, content and comfortable in your own skin? This is a mental equation of life question I will help us explore in later articles/posts.

I tell myself the holding space I inhabit is mine and it’s dedicated to me and my wellbeing alone, which is true, and yet in another way of looking at things it is also a shared space between myself and Mel. Thus, I am exploring my wellbeing and its real life application in relation to both myself and another human being simultaneously. On the one hand the holding space is for me individually to explore how I’m living my life, for what purpose and whether or not I’m coming in contact with my wellbeing and yet on the other hand the space is a shared one that we hold-together by exploring aspects of wellbeing in our own ways.

Part of what I explore is what my wellbeing consists of, how I solve for its creation in my day to day life and how I can carry it out so that by design I am able to improve the quality of my life and how I experience myself and others around me. Thus, part of the Wellbeing Equation in my life, that I have come to believe all of us needs is to periodically feel well in mind, body and spirit, has to do with figuring out how we go about creating space(s) for ourselves to explore our needs, desires, irritations, anxieties, worries, hopes, dreams etc., and how these contribute to our overall sense of ourselves and the quality of our living.

However, in a younger day like many others, I had an aversion to talking with someone else about my struggles in life. I felt doing so would be somehow weak of me, not quite right, not knowing it could be one of my biggest strengths and I feared doing so would overwhelm me. I worried I wouldn’t be able to bear the weight of more pain and anguish than I was already having a hard time shouldering. Thus, I felt like I should be able to deal with life and my problems by myself and didn’t understand the importance of exploring my thoughts and feelings in a safe space with another person who is caring and respectful and helps me put my thoughts, feelings and words into their present and historical wellbeing context.

After all, one of the misguided assumptions and myths handed down to many of us in our culture from our ancestor’s ancestors is that to be a “real man or woman” is to stand on our own two feet, go it alone and not ask for help in making our way in life. We should go it alone and to ask for help shows that we have an emotional weakness that we don’t know how to deal with. Thankfully, this misguided assumption and it’s problems related to living that we’ve all been exposed to and traumatized by in one form or another is beginning to be questioned in our society and a new sea-change is happening. New ways of exploring our humanity and what allows us to live out healthier ways of being is being openly discussed and debated by many of the voices that have historically been silenced or not paid enough attention to in our culture.

Thus, I didn’t want to feel more ashamed for the mistakes I was making in my life and so the more the myth of the “self-made man” persisted within my unconscious the more I attempted to “keep a stiff upper lip” the more my mental health suffered and the less I was able to empathize with others around me. This is when I knew I had a bigger problem than I knew what to do with. If I couldn’t empathize with others around me, how could I continue to do what I was most passionate about and interested in spending my time doing?

The more I went it alone the more isolated and disconnected I felt from myself and my loved ones. The choices I was making looking back on my life ended up not being the best for me though at the time I thought I was doing my best and in some ways I think I was. Part of the problem though was that I didn’t understand and know what I didn’t know and yet what I loved to do more than anything was helping people learn how to shoulder and navigate their lives and more importantly help them experience aspects of their wellbeing by helping them explore their internal emotional landscapes.

Over time, it became apparent that the way I had designed my life in relation to what I do for a living versus how I was proceeding with my free time thereafter were at odds with one another. Eventually, I understood that if I wanted to continue to pursue my passion of helping others I would need to learn how to take my own advice and learn to “teach what I most needed to learn.” How to design my life in ways that helped me connect with the best parts of myself and better deal with the parts of my life and myself that I had a harder time with. I needed to learn how to design my life for my wellbeing so that I could increase my own wellbeing and quality of living but first I needed to learn how to do the work. And in this book, I’ll share with you many of the day to day design issues at hand for most of us, bolstered by the science and research in the fields of health, biology, healing, positivity, psychology, happiness and other like-minded fields and what I’ve learned to help myself and countless others do in my psychotherapy practice—that we can design or lives for wellbeing.

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