How can I find more meaning in my day? Intentionally engaging in meaningful activities is a great way to increase positive emotions and prevent things like depression and anxiety! It’s another great positive emotion strategy!
Meaningful activities are those that benefit others, a beneficial cause, or society in some way. Doing these activities on purpose help give us a way to find meaning, feel better about ourselves, and increase positive emotions.
Find out how to find more meaning from these activities and how to choose which ones are best for you.
Hi, I’m Dr. Matt B., and these are your Emotional Minutes. Welcome back. I’m on this beach in Lake Tahoe. There has been a ton of litter this summer and last summer. There are also more people than in other years, and people are just leaving stuff around. It gets in the way of people being able to enjoy this great area. So, I thought I’d come here and pick up some trash. I did this to try to do something meaningful because meaningful activities are another positive emotion regulation strategy.
Meaningful Activities
Meaningful activities are activities that come to benefit other people, society at large, or a greater cause or purpose. Purposefully engaging in these activities, even if we didn’t plan to, can give us a sense of positivity and boost our mood and emotions. It can also focus our attention away from the negative and on to the positive in our lives.
Positive emotions give us feelings that we are contributing to the greater good and accomplishing something for others. These activities positively benefit emotion and emotion regulation, so they help us recognize our strengths and virtues. They are similar to acts of kindness in that they give us a sense that we are good people. They also bring our attention away from the negative and toward the positive and protect us against things like depression, anxiety, or high levels of negative emotion in general.
Examples of Meaningful Activities
Examples of meaningful activities are picking up trash, donating time at a food bank, giving blood, and taking time to help someone who might need support. Meaningful activities can be smaller-scale things you can do daily with your time that you might not have planned. You can tell these involve giving some time to a beneficial task.
When people give money to a cause, they can get a sense of meaning, but it’s usually pretty fleeting. Giving your time to something, for example, volunteering for the Special Olympics, often provides a lot of purpose and benefit. People know there are a lot of examples of meaningful activities, so how do you choose? One way to choose is by focusing on something meaningful to you. For instance, I really love Lake Tahoe, and I love this beach, so I chose to come here today and pick up trash as a meaningful activity, so others could enjoy this place I enjoy.
Sometimes people will give time or effort to an organization. For example, a medical organization of some scientific pursuit, say one for cancer, if a family member has experienced something like that. That can provide a lot of meaning as well. Or maybe it’s just a cause that you might care about. For some people, it might be environmental causes; for others, it might be helping less fortunate people or people in poverty. Picking something close to you or something you care about can be a good and effective way to choose a meaningful activity.
Best Practice
Similar to some of the previous episodes when we’ve talked about engaging activities, these activities can be done in a scheduled sense or brought out if you’ve had a more difficult day and you need something to help you sort of boost your emotions. Engaging in these activities is usually shown to do that, especially after a stressful day. These things can also be done socially or non-socially. Usually, a mix of all of those things can be good. By this, I mean doing them scheduled and off the cuff and then doing them socially and non-socially. This can be helpful as well.
I am going to get back to this beach and pick up a little more trash. After I do that, I am going to hang out on the beach and enjoy it. I’m Dr. Matt B, and these are your Emotional Minutes. Thanks for stopping by. We’ll see you next time.
If this post has inspired you to volunteer, the links below will take you to some resources.
National Cleanup Day
Volunteer at the Special Olympics
Big Brothers Big Sisters
