Are you mentally tired even if you don’t get much physical work done? Everyday pressures, constant notifications, work pressure and pressure to meet other people’s expectations can overwhelm your mind and make you very tired of it too.
For the problem is you are doing too much. It is you don’t always take a minute to stop and reflect and recover.
Japanese philosophy offers a lot of ideas to help people live more consciously, appreciate the present moment and live life with imperfections. Such ideas aren’t immediate solutions to stress but can help to put us in a healthier routine and keep our emotional health in check.
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Here are seven Japanese concepts that might help you slow down, define boundaries and create balance in your daily life.
1. Ikigai: To find meaning in everyday life.
Ikigai is commonly defined as a sense of purpose or a reason to get up in the morning. It can come from meaningful work, personal interests, relationships or small activities that make life worthwhile.
When you feel mentally drained, it’s easy to move through the day without thinking about what’s really important to you. You’ll spend most of your time meeting deadlines, completing responsibilities and responding to other people’s needs.
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The idea of ikigai makes you remember what is truly significant in life.
You don’t need to have a single grand purpose. It may be spending time with people you love, learning a new skill, playing a sport, making something or helping someone.
What makes a day meaningful to you? Make time for that one thing that you find fun and purposeful and not another thing to do.
2. Wabi-Sabi: Accept imperfection
Wabi-sabi is an aesthetic and philosophical concept that finds beauty in imperfection, simplicity and the passage of time.
In everyday life it can be a helpful reminder that not everything has to be perfect. You can put unnecessary pressure on yourself to perform perfectly, maintain an ideal routine or make every decision right.
This need to be right always wears on your mind.
Wabi-sabi promotes a more accepting approach. Mistakes are part of being human.
How do you practise it? Let yourself get through a task without having to go over and over every detail when perfection is not necessary. Realize that you will have less productive days and not make your worth based on one day.
3. Kaizen: Small, Sustainable Changes.
Kaizen is to improve little by little and slowly. It is an important notion in Japanese business and management as much as it is in human habits.
When you are under pressure to change your whole life at once, you may be planning to exercise regularly, sleep earlier, stop using your phone and rework your life completely in one week.
When such changes become difficult to maintain there can be frustration.
Kaizen is different in that it starts small and you build slowly.
How do I implement it? If you’re going to do it, take a 5-minute break between tasks, put your phone away during meals or prepare for the next morning before going to bed. And then it’ll get easier to do and you’ll do it again.
Small steps may seem insignificant at first, but consistent habits can make daily life more manageable over time.
4. Ma: Let us rest and silence.
Ma is a Japanese concept which refers to the meaningful space or interval between things. It is found in traditional art, architecture, music and many other aspects of Japanese culture.
In our everyday life, the idea will help you to see that you can never forget pauses and that you can never get to the next stage if life is all activity.
People aren’t comfortable doing nothing. They check their phones when they have some free time, listen to something, try to figure something out.
But constant stimulation can make it difficult to slow down and pay attention to how you feel.
As you move from one task to another without feeling rushed you can think, and you can think, in the space between the two.
How to practice it: Take a couple of minutes between meetings or tasks. Have one meal without looking at your phone. Just sit quietly for a little while and not feel the need to be productive.
Such pauses do not have to be long to become a useful part of your day-to-day routine.
5. Shikata Ga Nai: Accept What You Cannot Control
Shikata ga nai is a Japanese expression that roughly means “it cannot be helped,” or “there is nothing that can be done about it.”
The expression is acceptance of circumstances that cannot be changed. That does not mean giving up on everything or refusing to challenge unfair situations.
Instead, it drives home the reality that what you can do is your influence, and what you can’t control is your ability to influence.
You can’t control everyone’s opinion, every little movement or turn of your life or every bad thing that can happen. The hours spent worrying about all of those things will cost you time but do nothing to change the situation.
You are allowed to face reality and find out what you can do.
How do you practise it? When something goes wrong ask yourself whether there’s a practical solution you can take in order to improve the situation. If there’s, focus on that. If not, let yourself ignore everything you’ve seen so many times and keep thinking about the past.
Acceptance is not approval. You can recognize a difficult situation but still take action when action is possible.
6. Oubaitori: Stop Comparing Your Journey With Others.
Oubaitori is inspired by four flowering trees: cherry, plum, peach and apricot. They bloom in their own way, they all come from different parts of the world and shouldn’t be expected to follow the same path.
Comparison can become a big source of mental pressure. You may feel behind when you see someone else getting a promotion, buying a house, travelling frequently or reaching a personal milestone.
Social media can make these comparisons all the more intense in that you get to see carefully curated moments from other people’s lives as opposed to their daily struggles.
Oubaitori reminds you that your progress doesn’t need to match someone else’s timeline.
How to practice it: At the same time, look at what someone else’s success is and take it as evidence to try to find out what you actually do want for yourself.
As opposed to measuring your life against someone else’s, look at your life, what you want to do with your life.
7. Kintsugi: Care about Healing.
Kintsugi is a Japanese technique for repairing broken pottery with lacquer and precious metals (gold in many cases). Rather than glossing over the repaired cracks, the technique makes them part of the object’s appearance.
Kintsugi’s metaphor for personal growth is that hard things do not mean you don’t have value. Errors, disappointments and emotional setbacks may be part of your story but do not define your entire identity.
When you are mentally exhausted, you might think of yourself as not being as strong or productive as you used to be. You may also feel pressure to recover quickly from a difficult experience.
Kintsugi’s idea is a gentler one: Healing takes time and needing time to recover doesn’t make you weak. How do you practice it? Accept what you have faced and don’t think it’s a sign that you have not done anything. Let’s take time to digest that we’ve faced obstacles, learn from them when you can and then ask for help when you need to.
You don’t have to try to make up that painful experiences were good for you. You can recognize what they had done, and how you are getting past them.
How can I bring those Japanese ideas into my day-to-day life?
You have no right to adopt all seven ideas at once. Choose the ones that relate to the pressures that you are most likely to be under. If you are a perfectionist, do wabi-sabi. When you get overwhelmed with an incessant stream of activity, make room for Ma. If you spend too much time comparing yourself with others, consider oubaitori.
You can also build on these points into a day-to-day routine:
- In the morning: What’s your one important priority for the day?
- Take short breaks between tasks, not always keeping going, as you would at work.
- When plans change: If you can control so much, how much control do you have over what you cannot control?
- In the evening: What is that one thing you did well that you did not expect to have been perfect on the day?
- Throughout the week: Small, meaningful changes that are sustainable instead of a big change but not one that’s immediate.
The goal is not to turn these philosophies into another set of rules you must follow perfectly. It is to use it as a reminder to live more with self-compassion, patience and more awareness.
The feeling of being mentally drained is not always something you can fix by lifestyle changes alone. Frequent exhaustion, anxiety or low mood can have a number of causes. If these feelings still affect your daily life, speak to a healthcare or mental health professional.
A calmer life does not require you to solve everything at once. Sometimes it starts with a little more space, accepting what cannot be changed and allowing yourself to take the next step slowly.
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