
Dr. Dean Fido discusses his research on the Ikigai-9 scale, highlighting its potential to enhance both physical and mental well-being in episode 12 of the Ikigai Podcast.
Dean has a PhD in cognitive neuroscience and currently lectures in Criminal Psychology at the University of Derby, England.
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Ikigai and What It Is Not
For Dean, he understood ikigai by learning what it is not. There is this misconception that ikigai is something related to work or entrepreneurship. This is why the best way to define ikigai is by clearing out what it is not -- not so much a goal to attain, but more on the simple things in our life that give us happiness.
Ikigai as the reason for living
Nick: It's comforting to know there is someone like Yasuhiro and yourself, putting some real, verifiable study into this because, as we know, ikigai is a greatly misunderstood concept that people sort of relate to entrepreneurship or finding your dream job, or purpose, and it certainly does relate to purpose, but it goes far deeper than that.
So how would you define ikigai?
Dean: I think it sounds a very simple question, but I think, in our research, that was the first sort of stumbling block which we hit because when Yasu brought the term to me, I actually asked him how he would define it.
Because he's obviously Japanese and English speaking, and he even had to take a step back almost, to kind of consider how he was going to portray that information to me.
The first thing that he said to me was, it's almost your purpose in life, or your reason for living, and then he started to elaborate more on what it wasn't rather than what it was, which for me, was a really interesting way of trying to talk about something.
Which perhaps in the UK, we've never spoken about before, it's not something that we attain, which obviously, commonly comes up. It's really interesting that you mentioned entrepreneurship, because that's one of the examples that he used in terms of actually what it's not.
I think that's quite a misdemeanour which people fall into.
Nick: Yeah, there's this idea: it's doing something you love, that you're good at, that the world needs, and that you can be paid for.
Recently, I have seen a few people change that to what you can be rewarded for, because every Japanese I've met and I've shown that diagram to they've said "Oh, no, ikigai is not about money. It's not about making money." That's probably an interesting way to approach it.
Maybe say, look here it is hard to translate or define but we can start by saying what it's not. I learned that it's more about daily living and it's not so much a goal to attain, and it can be more than one thing.
There's also this idea, it's moving towards the future -- feeling that your life is moving towards a better future as well.
Ikigai and Mental Health
There are plenty of books written on the subject of ikigai. However, most of them focus on relating ikigai to work or entrepreneurship. Good thing that some professionals study ikigai in-depth -- exploring how this concept affects our mental health. Dean shares why they chose to relate ikigai to mental health.
Ikigai resonates with people
Nick: When people think of mental health, it's generally this concept of depression. And now we have this new, I guess, phrase of positive psychology. I think most people would relate ikigai to positive psychology, they wouldn't relate it to mental health.
Dean: That's an extremely good point, actually, and ironically, it is the antithesis of the way that we were going.
So because this was the first sort of Western, especially UK paper on ikigai, and we wanted to frame the outcome measures, which were general mental well-being stress, anxiety and depression.
The reason that we chose those kinds of four indicators is because that's what people, laypeople at least, and people that read media, social media, they're kind of buzzwords almost that people can buy into and people will understand.
Whereas if we started talking about elements of positive psychology, such as mental resilience, or even physical resilience, these are terms which are difficult to understand and it's harder for laypeople to kind of interact with our research.
One of the most important things for both Yasu and myself is that when we do any piece of research, we publish it freely, so we make our research available to everyone. We make sure that we write it in a way where anyone can pick it up.
Before I send a paper interview published, I always send it to my dad to read it. I make him circle anything that he doesn't understand. Because for me, as a researcher, if somebody doesn't understand something that's relatively small, then that kind of blocks their access to understanding the key terms of your research.
Ikigai-9: The Nine Items
Ikigai-9 is a psychometric tool published and validated by Japanese researchers Tadanori Imai, Hisao Osada, and Yoshitsugu Nishimura; this is what Dr. Dean Fido and his colleagues used in their study to measure ikigai that will allow them to make direct comparisons with Japanese culture.
A way to measure one's ikigai
Nick: Well, we should probably introduce the nine items. I guess, as someone who's not a researcher, I would see them as statements.
Then the participants were asked to see to what degree each statement applied to them from one to five with one being does not apply to me, and five applies to me a lot. So I'll just read out the nine statements that the participants read and wrote their corresponding number:
- I believe that I have some impact on someone
- My life is mentally rich and fulfilled
- I am interested in many things
- I feel that I am contributing to someone or to society
- I would like to develop myself
- I often feel that I'm happy
- I think that my existence is needed by something or someone
- I would like to learn something new or start something
- I have room in my mind
And I'm assuming that last one is for me, in my mind to think or contemplate.
Dean: The last one, which you read out, and the reason it's at the bottom of that list is that the way we've presented them in the paper is the degree to which they strongly tap into ikigai.
Okay, so the first one being, I believe that I have some impact on someone, and also my life is mentally rich and fulfilled, they kind of epitomize what ikigai is or how somebody might start framing their experiences of ikigai.
As we go down the list, the statements become weak, still valid, but weak, and the last one is something which caused quite a lot of contention, both at the translation stage and also in some of the new research, which I'll talk about later.
So I have room in my mind very much tapped into, I have the mental capacity to take on new things, to learn new things, etc... to kind of add to society, to add to my life.
But the purpose of this kind of translation was that it was a direct translation, both text and meaning. So Yasu and Kenichi, they kind of cross translated. So one of them had to go translate, the other one tried to read, translate it back into English.
Then we looked at the disparities between the translations, and really boiled those down in terms of both text and then meaning to make sure that the true impact came across.
The ‘I have room in my mind’, when that was said to me the first time, I really did have no idea what that meant. So it took a little bit of back and forth, and that's what we settled on, we've since talked to Japanese co-authors on different projects.
For them, they do understand what that means, but in UK samples, there is a little bit of disparity, because that could be taken in many different ways. And just a quick preview to some kind of research, which we're doing in the future, we've recently undergone a validation of this in a Turkish population for reasons which I'll talk about later.
And this same item came up again, where the Turkish translators also had difficulty and we're translating it in a completely different way.
So ideally, there is actually scope for removing that item from the questionnaire. It wouldn't have any sort of meaningful impact on the data. But it does mean that ikigai-9 would then become the ikigai-8.
Nick: Now it stands out for me. I lived in Japan for 10 years. So I think I kind of knew what it meant, but at the same time thinking okay, that's interesting how that's been translated because it's not as specific as the others. It could be open to interpretation.Ikigai and Anxiety & Stress
With the use of ikigai-9, Dr. Dean Fido and his co-authors found out that higher ikigai-9 scores were related to greater well-being and less depression. However, they found no relationships to either stress or anxiety.
Stronger mental well-being with ikigai
Nick: The objectives were to translate the ikigai-9 into English, and that included a back translation to validate the ikigai-9 in an English speaking sample, and then delineate associations between ikigai and state measures of mental well-being, depression, anxiety and stress.
So obviously, you achieved the first two, did you think you achieved the third?
Dean: So in terms of the third, just for the kind of listeners benefit, I can very like shortly boil down the key findings.
So what we do, we try to make direct associations between ikigai and measures of general mental well-being, depression, anxiety, and stress. What we kind of hypothesized was that if ikigai or the sensations and the feelings of ikigai was a sort of a master lock, almost to a functional mental well-being, then we should see positive associations with good mental well-being.
The negative associations were feelings of stress, anxiety, and depression. And what the results indicated was that the scores on ikigai-9 had very high predictability of stronger mental well-being, which was great, and low scores on measures of depression, which is also great.
The interesting findings, however, is that we didn't find any associations between stress and anxiety with the ikigai-9 which was quite unexpected.
Nick: So why do you think so? It sounds like if you find ikigai in your life, or you develop ikigai can help with depression, and it obviously has all these positive psychological benefits.
But you're saying from the research, from what we can tell it is not going to help with anxiety and stress.
Is that because anxiety and stress are usually related to specific things in life -- meeting people, presenting, whereas depression, it's very hard to find the cause and sometimes there can be no cause.
Dean: I would say that's a perfect summation. If we're gonna take that hypothetical pin out of the wall that we talked about earlier, I was very happy with the relationship between positive mental well-being, because it's almost as if it's like this resilient factor.
We really did expect the negative association with depression due to the previous literature regarding ikigai and suicide completion.
Because as we know, depression is a huge precursor to suicide completion, sadly, and suicide attempts and suicide ideation, and the way in which we kind of describe these conflicting results with anxiety and stress is that depression seems to be more of a larger, more noticeable state in which somebody is in.
So the common sorts of qualitative feelings of depression are more than sort of negative thoughts, but they're also physical responses, that people get fatigued, people can feel their heart, and they can feel this overwhelming sadness.
Whereas, yes, that can manifest in anxiety and stress, but in the West, people are anxious and people are stressed all of the time.
People have such conflicting and demanding work schedules, which put them under immense stress where they're working day in and day out, just to complete their contracted hours.
People have hectic lifestyles where they might be might be a single parent, or they might be a parent in a kind of dual relationship, but they've got to work, and then they've got to look after kids, and then they've got to clean and make food.
So people are constantly stressed. And so that could account for some of this variation. And then that's why it's really important that we very much in future research, control the baseline situations that the people are in.
And that's a lot harder to do than it kind of is just by saying it. Because what's stressful for you might not be stressful for me, which might not be stressful for somebody else.
So it's almost kind of like we need this, this isolated vacuum to fully test this. It was really interesting, and especially because the measures of depression, anxiety and stress that we use are all sorts of validated measures, which have been around for years and years and years. We have very high faith that they are true recordings and true results.
For the full podcast conversation, go to: Dr Dean Fido on the Ikigai 9