Life Purpose Score, Energy Vampires & Old School Writing Perks

 

Purpose

Did you know you can get a score for how much purpose you feel in your life?

The Purpose in Life Test (PIL) was developed by Crumbaugh and Maholick to assess how purposeful a person feels in their life.

By assessing your responses to a series of 20 statements such as “Life to me seems always exciting” or “In life, I have no goals or aims at all” the PIL is able to provide you with a measure of your feelings of purpose, meaning and happiness.

This test was largely designed to test the correlation between meaning and what Viktor Frankl called the “existential vacuum”, a sense of emptiness and futility that can lead to psychological issues like depression and anxiety. As a result, it also provides a score related to suicidality which is predicted by any lack of meaning and purpose in the responses.

If you want to see how you score for purpose, meaning and happiness, check out the Purpose In Life Test here.

Energy

One of your New Year’s Resolutions should be to identify Energy Vampires in your life and find a way to minimise their impact on your energy levels.

We all know people that, after just a few minutes, will have found a way to suck the energy, not just out of you, but out of the entire room they occupy.

Whether is a widespread negativity, constant complaining, nitpicking, micro-aggressions, inappropriate sighing, constant problem-raising, or just general glass-half-empty approach to life, these people leave you feeling the need to book a long vacation in the sunshine after even the briefest of encounters.

Instead of spending time with these kinds of people, try and spend more time with those people that fill you with energy, excitement, inspiration and positivity.

Oh, and “if you admire somebody, you should go ahead and tell them. People never get the flowers while they can still smell them“.

Productivity

Did you get an “old school” paper notebook or planner over the holidays? If so, you might already be on track to improve your productivity.

Research shows that the physical act of writing has surprising cognitive benefits for both children and adults.

By writing things down on paper, you can improve memory, recall, and conceptual understanding of whatever it is you are writing down. There is something in the more complex motor skills of gripping and moving a pen that causes the brain to be more engaged in the learning process which causes the brain to fire at the same frequencies as it would when learning new information.

Research also suggests that scribbling with a stylus on a screen activates the same brain pathways as using a pen or pencil, which is good news for those of you with a more modern version, such as the reMarkable tablet.

So for those projects that require a little more brain power, consider figuring it out first on paper before switching back to your technology.

I hope these ideas have given you something to think about and reminded you of what is most important to focus on for the rest of the week. 

Happy holidays, and until next time…