The Power of Writing About Your Values

Writing about your values has a significant impact on your actions and mental well-being. Living by what you truly care about won't always be easy, but it can bring you more fulfillment and meaning. Pixabay/Pexels What do you genuinely care about? It's a deceptively simple question, but one we often neglect answering for ourselves. As a result, we tend to focus our efforts and energies on tasks that don't truly align with what we want out of life. We act according to our short-term needs (while maybe even sabotaging our long-term goals), or we follow other people's expectations, not questioning whether they are in our own best interest. We might focus on what we “should” be doing, going from chore to chore, making us feel like we're trapped in an endlessly looping hamster wheel. Living by our values provides an alternative. Rather than mindlessly trying to live up to other people's standards, values work asks us to take responsibility for our life journey. When we choose what's important in life, we create a deeply personal metric for success. Do we care about putting love into the world? About appreciating and protecting nature? About creating beauty? The best of our cultural, familial, and wisdom traditions can guide us, but ultimately the truly heartfelt choices are ours to make “naked and in the wind.” By making such choices, we are more likely not only to engage in life with motivation and follow through but also to bring more attention, care, and energy to the journeys that uplift us. Values help us build socially positive emotions, like gratitude and appreciation, and the feeling that we are making a meaningful difference in other people's lives. And a simple exercise has shown to be particularly effective in distilling what those values might be. Research has shown that writing about your values has a significant impact on your actions as well as on your mental well-being—more than just simply picking values from a list or stating them in a […]