📚 Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life

Author

Héctor García, Francesc Miralles

Year of release

2016

Genre

Self-Help, Relationships, Lifestyle, Health

Pages

194

Average WPM

183

Date Started - Finished

24-Jan-2022 - 25-Jan-2022

Time took

2.27 Hours

---

About the book

What I Liked About It and What I didn’t

• What I liked
  • Got to learn new things
  • It has good researches / experiments cited and discussed
  • A lot of the tips it gives is also in Islam
• What I didn’t like
  • It has a lot of useless history/traditional info (according to me) which could be skipped while reading and you would still understand what the book is trying to convey
  • Basic self-help book, doesn’t do anything new
  • In a few places they discuss/mention problems but never address how to solve them

How I Discovered It

• Online and through the book store

Who Should Read It?

• Anyone who wants to read a casual self-help book

Actionable Takeaways

• It was my first self-help book so this is what got me into the genre
• The book didn’t really have an impact on me (at least not a noticeable one )

Top Quotes

---

Fill your belly to 80 percent.

Body wears down much faster during periods of crisis. Most health problems are caused by stress……… Stress has a degenerative effect over time

We have to learn to turn off the autopilot that’s steering us in an endless loop

Science has shown that sleep is a key antiaging tool

We all have the capacity to do noble or terrible things. The side of the equation we end up on depends on our decisions, not on the condition in which we find ourselves.

“If you are angry and want to fight, think about it for three days before coming to blows. After three days, the intense desire to fight will pass on its own.”

Einstein goes, “Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That is relativity.”

When we say we’re multitasking, what we’re really doing is switching back and forth between tasks very quickly. Unfortunately, we’re not computers adept at parallel processing. We end up spending all our energy alternating between tasks, instead of focusing on doing one of them well.

Central tenet of Stoicism is knowing what we can control and what we can’t- In the words of Epictetus, “It’s not what happens to you, but how you react that matters.”

Summary + Notes

---

PROLOGUE: Ikigai: A mysterious word

• ikigai came up. This Japanese concept, which translates roughly as “the happiness of always being busy”
• Okinawans live by the principle of ichariba chode, a local expression that means “treat everyone like a brother, even if you’ve never met them before.”

Whatever you do, don’t retire!

• In fact, many Japanese people never really retire—they keep doing what they love for as long as their health allows.
• There is, in fact, no word in Japanese that means retire in the sense of “leaving the workforce for good” as in English.
• having a purpose in life is so important in Japanese culture that our idea of retirement simply doesn’t exist there.

The island of (almost) eternal youth

• Their blood tests reveal fewer free radicals (which are responsible for cellular ageing), as a result of drinking tea and eating until their stomachs are only 80 percent full.

The 80 percent secret

• One of the most common sayings in Japan is “Hara hachi bu,” which is repeated before or after eating and means something like “Fill your belly to 80 percent”.

The five Blue Zones

• According to scientists who have studied the 5 Blue Zones, the keys to longevity are
  1. Diet
  2. Exercise
  3. Finding a purpose in life (an ikigai)
  4. Forming strong social ties—that is, having a broad circle of friends
  5. Good family relations.

Active mind, youthful body

• There is tension between what is good for someone and what they want to do. This is because people, especially older people, like to do things as they’ve always done them. The problem is that when the brain develops ingrained habits, it doesn’t need to think anymore. Things get done quickly and efficiently on automatic pilot, often in a very advantageous way. This creates a tendency to stick to routines, and the only way of breaking these is to confront the brain with new information.
• description of a “mental workout” might sound a bit formal, but simply interacting with others—playing a game, for example—offers new stimuli and helps prevent the depression that can come with solitude.

Stress: Accused of killing longevity

• Many people seem older than they are. Research into the causes of premature ageing has shown that stress has a lot to do with it, because the body wears down much faster during periods of crisis.
• The American Institute of Stress investigated this degenerative process and concluded that most health problems are caused by stress.

How does stress work?

• Stress has a degenerative effect over time. A sustained state of emergency affects the neurons associated with memory, as well as inhibiting the release of certain hormones, the absence of which can cause depression.
  • Secondary effects include irritability, insomnia, anxiety, and high blood pressure.

Be mindful about reducing stress

• “We have to learn to turn off the autopilot that’s steering us in an endless loop. We all know people who snack while talking on the phone or watching the news. You ask them if the omelette they just ate had onion in it, and they can’t tell you,

A little stress is good for you

• low levels of stress have been shown to be beneficial.
• University of California, Riverside, discovered that people who maintained a low level of stress, who faced challenges and put their heart and soul into their work in order to succeed, lived longer than those who chose a more relaxed lifestyle and retired earlier

A lot of sitting will age you

• Spending too much time seated at work or home not only reduces muscular and respiratory fitness but also increases appetite and curbs the desire to participate in activities.

A model’s best-kept secret

• Science has shown that sleep is a key antiaging tool

Antiaging attitudes

• Most doctors agree that the secret to keeping the body young is keeping the mind active
• Yeshiva University, found that the people who live the longest have two dispositional traits in common:
  • Positive attitude
  • High degree of emotional awareness

Better living through logotherapy: A few key ideas

• We all have the capacity to do noble or terrible things. The side of the equation we end up on depends on our decisions, not on the condition in which we find ourselves.

Morita therapy

• A donkey that is tied to a post by a rope will keep walking around the post in an attempt to free itself, only to become more immobilized and attached to the post. The same thing applies to people with obsessive thinking who become more trapped in their own suffering when they try to escape from their fears and discomfort

Naikan meditation

• “If you are angry and want to fight, think about it for three days before coming to blows. After three days, the intense desire to fight will pass on its own.”

Going with the flow

• Einstein goes, “Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That is relativity.”

Strategy 2: Have a clear, concrete objective

• Albert Einstein, “a happy man is too satisfied with the present to dwell on the future.”

Strategy 3: Concentrate on a single task

• We often think that combining tasks will save us time, but scientific evidence shows that it has the opposite effect.
• Our brains can take in millions of bits of information but can only actually process a few dozen per second.
• When we say we’re multitasking, what we’re really doing is switching back and forth between tasks very quickly. Unfortunately, we’re not computers adept at parallel processing. We end up spending all our energy alternating between tasks, instead of focusing on doing one of them well.
• Concentrating on one thing at a time may be the single most important factor in achieving flow.
• studies conducted at Stanford University by Clifford Ivar Nass describe our generation as suffering from an epidemic of multitasking.
• Other studies indicate that working on several things at once lowers our productivity by at least 60 percent and our IQ by more than ten points.
• who were addicted to their smartphones got less sleep, felt less connected to their community at school, and were more likely to show signs of depression.
• few ideas for creating a space and time free of distractions, to increase our chances of reaching a state of flow and thereby getting in touch with our ikigai:
  • Don’t look at any kind of screen for the first hour you’re awake and the last hour before you go to sleep.
  • Enable the “do not disturb” function so only the people closest to you can contact you in case of emergency.
  • Read and respond to e-mail only once or twice per day. Define those times clearly and stick to them.
  • Train your mind to return to the present when you find yourself getting distracted.
  • Work in a space where you will not be distracted.
  • Divide each activity into groups of related tasks, and assign each group its own place and time.

The purity of Ghibli

• Miyazaki can’t stop drawing. The day after his “retirement,” instead of going on vacation or staying at home, he went to Studio Ghibli and sat down to draw.
• One year later, he announced he wouldn’t make any more feature films but that he would keep on drawing until the day he died.

Microflow: Enjoying mundane tasks

• Bill Gates washes the dishes every night. He says he enjoys it—that it helps him relax and clear his mind, and that he tries to do it a little better each day

The interviews

• To live a long time you need to do three things:
  1. Exercise to stay healthy
  2. Eat well
  3. Spend time with people

So, eat less to live longer?

• Alternative to following the 80 percent rule on a daily basis is to fast for one or two days each week. The 5:2 (or fasting) diet recommends two days of fasting (consuming fewer than five hundred calories) every week

The secrets of green tea

• One cup of white tea might pack the same punch as about a dozen glasses of orange juice.
• In summary: Drinking green or white tea every day can help us reduce the free radicals in our bodies, keeping us young longer.

What’s the worst thing that could happen?

• He recommended practicing negative visualization every night before falling asleep.
• As a result, he was able to answer the question “What’s the worst thing that could happen?”

Meditating for healthier emotions

• Central tenet of Stoicism is knowing what we can control and what we can’t
• Worrying about things that are beyond our control accomplishes nothing
• We should have a clear sense of what we can change and what we can’t
• In the words of Epictetus, “It’s not what happens to you, but how you react that matters.”

The ten rules of ikigai

• Stay active; don’t retire.
• Take it slow.
• Don’t fill your stomach.
• Surround yourself with good friends.
• Smile
• Reconnect with nature
• Give thanks.
• Live in the moment.