How to Diversify Your Wellbeing Portfolio
Original Medium Post HERE
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Maximize joy and resilience through diversification
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Have you ever had the friend who falls in love and completely disappears?
Maybe you knew a group of college roommates with one who didn’t even emerge from their bedroom to eat because they couldn’t be with anyone else but their sweetheart.
When the relationship doesn’t work, maybe that college roommate entered the cycle of breakup (and despondency), return to friends, meeting someone new, disappearing, breakup (and despondency), returning to friends, etc.. Over time, maybe there weren’t as many friends to return to.
The challenge: not enough diversification of the joy portfolio.
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Diversifying
The analogy: investing
Over time, investors make the most money at a given level of risk of losing money by diversifying: allocating resources across a range of investments.
Investors can diversify in two ways:
1) Across asset classes — e.g. investing in land and real estate, US stocks and international stocks, private equity funds and venture capital.
2) Within asset classes — e.g. investing in an Index Fund of stocks that make up the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
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Diversifying the joy portfolio
We are seeking to maximize joy: happiness x time, in community. We will always experience ups and downs in life and our emotions; joy is about emotional resilience. A body of research tells us five pillars matter most for joy: relationships, purpose, fitness, mindfulness, and fun.[1]
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Like with financial investments, we can diversify in two ways:
1) Across the five pillars
2) Within a pillar
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What does a diversified joy portfolio look like?
Returning to our hapless romantic college roommate:
Diversifying across pillars:
The new lover might fulfill a need for: relationships with the new one; purpose being with their lover; fitness together; mindfulness contemplating each other; and fun being together. But how can any of those needs be met when their everything is out of town for the weekend?
Here’s a more diversified approach for the college paramour:
· Maintaining other relationships (more below)
· Pursuing purpose by studying geology (the roommate aspires to be a geologist) and volunteering in an after-school tutoring program
· Walking to classes, attending yoga, going to the gym, and eating salad and other healthyish dining hall foods to pursue fitness
· Being in nature and meditating for mindfulness
· Going out with friends and performing stand-up comedy for fun
They’ll receive another benefit from diversifying across pillars: many activities have an extra joy impact, because they connect with multiple pillars. For example, the yoga class can combine fitness, mindfulness and relationship building.
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Diversifying within a pillar:
The new lover who maintains friendships and family connections has a more diversified relationship portfolio. This could means a lower high: when addictive new love entices our college friend to seclude with their darling, they might resist and join friends for a mediocre dining hall meal of yesterday’s chicken in today’s soup.
But if a breakup happens, a great group of loving friends surrounds them — and gets them out of the college-smelling room for cheap beer in a college-smelling bar.
More good news: a diverse set of relationships strengthens all relationships — including that new love (if it’s good), and eliminates unrealistic expectations for one person to meet every need.[2] If friends get to know the new Juliet and know she is good for their Romeo, they will support them through the rocky time when Romeo wants to break up because he heard Juliet slurping her day-old-dining-hall-chicken-soup.
The lovers finally emerge to share dining hall soup with day-old-chicken. Friends are at the table, but they don’t notice them yet. He hasn’t yet heard her slurp. Image generated by Microsoft Copilot.
Shifting allocations — finance and joy:
Sometimes, we should shift how we allocate time in our joy portfolio.
The finance analogy: you might aim to have stocks be 50–75% of your investment portfolio. When stocks are performing well, you might invest closer to 75% of your money there. In turbulent times, you might reduce stocks investments to closer to 50% and increase your investment in bonds.
For joy: at certain times in life, perhaps we need to put more time in at that job, take care of a loved one, train for a marathon, or take a meditation retreat.
Just as with a financial portfolio, we should review our joy portfolio every few months to make sure the balance feels right in our current circumstances. Over the long-run, we should keep it diversified to maximize our resilience and wellbeing.
Over the long run, how we choose to allocate our time isn’t just our joy portfolio; it is who we are.
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Diversifying for joy across community:
Joy lives in community; when we increase joy across a community, we increase our own joy too.
To maximize joy across our community, we should provide diversified options so community members can more easily access each pillar.
We can provide large-scale community events and one-on-one mentoring and connection opportunities so introverts and extroverts can build relationships. We can provide volunteer opportunities in food pantries, neighborhood cleanups, mentoring, and advocacy to speak to purpose and passion for a range of people. We can improve access to a range of fitness opportunities — and have diverse park structures so people can connect and exercise in a range of ways outdoors.
We are working to do just this in East Boston . . .
Please share, subscribe, and join our movement by emailing me or supporting East Boston Social Centers.
This is the 47th post about boosting joy the only way we can: in community.
Stay joyful, East Boston.
