You can adopt a new workout routine, cut down on your beer intake, or experiment with a new hairstyle–but how do you actually rewire and refocus your life in the new year? Intentional living, like most wellness terms (including the word wellness itself), has a wide range of meanings and interpretations, but Dr. Nigel Lester, Director of Mental Health and psychiatrist at PALM Health in Ladue, defines it as an “attempt to consciously live in accordance with your values.” In other words, stop zombie-walking through life and start sitting in the drivers’ seat.
It’s hardly a new concept—Lester cites the ancient Temple of Apollo, the entrance of which has a carving that reads, “Know Thyself.” He also references as an early adopter of this practice Mahatma Gandhi, who said, “Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.” Lester adds: “Back to the early Greeks, there was this sense that to live intentionally, to understand yourself and to understand what it is to live well, was fundamentally connected to the human purpose and to happiness.”
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Lester explains that this concept most likely has become relevant again in the mental health conversations of today due to high levels of societal burnout—evidenced by record levels of depression, anxiety, overeating, and excessive drinking and substance abuse—as well as a muddying of the understanding of what will actually improve our wellbeing due to social media and the saturation of information. “Within the idea of pursuing intentional living, you have to stop and ask yourself, ‘What is it to live well? What is it to live a happy, healthy fulfilling life?’” Lester says. “It’s saying, ‘I have a choice in how I live my life. I may not be able to change some of the things in the world that are making me stressed, but I have a choice in how I live my individual life.’”
Lester emphasizes that intentional living requires individuals to dig a bit deeper than “buy this cream,” “eat this super food,” or “follow this ‘guru’ on YouTube,” and instead focus on the sacredness of personal wellness through self-reflection, awareness, and disregarding simple solutions for our most complex problems.
At PALM, a holistic health service with a mission to “empower people to transform their health and feel their best in mind and body,” Lester explains that mental health experts use a Temperament Character Inventory to guide individuals in intentional living, from which PALM now has more than 60,000 international case studies showing evidence-based growth. It starts with a self-report personality test that measures the fundamentals of temperament and emotional drives, which are largely the part that moves us unconsciously, and continues on by helping to identify values and value alignment—also known as intentional living. The test questions how participants speak, listen, and respond to others, and so on.
The program then outlines specific measurable, attainable, timely goals for moving toward those values. “It’s about setting goals…that allow you to make choices that align with your values and stay focused on what really motivates you in life,” Lester explains. “Being self-aware is about examining your own behavior and how it matches those values.”
Lester notes that a supportive next step is working with a coach at PALM to assist with that range of goals: “I can often be quite unfair to my patients and stop them when they’re telling me everything that’s wrong in their life by saying, ‘OK, I hear what you don’t want, but what I’m interested to know is, what do you want?’ It nearly always floors people. And I’m being unfair because it’s very difficult to understand, ultimately, what do we want, unless we give ourselves some space and some time to become self-aware and examine ourselves. Wellbeing Coaching was developed specifically to address that.”
He explains that, for those looking for a more intensive level of intervention, PALM partners with the St. Louis nonprofit Anthropedia Center for Well-Being, which assembles experts from around the world to develop wellbeing education, including a six-day retreat called the Global Burnout Recovery Program that addresses the concept of intentional living.
As a first step in everyday life, however, Lester advises incorporating self-reflection and mindful relaxation into your routine, such as structured journaling. “For example, use your journal to say, ‘Today I’m going to observe times when I was emotional and how my emotional self was reactive and predictable and unconsciously followed a well-worn schema. And how would that be different if I was intentional? How would that be different if I was aware of my emotionality, able to calm it, and able to actually think more intentionally about my choices? I think that journaling, particularly that sort of retrospective awareness of your day, can be a very powerful and easy tool to start a process of intentional living.”
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Beyond the mental health benefits of intentional living practices, Lester references a study in Finland, which showed people who had developed “well-rounded creative character with a sense of perspective and intention” as also having better cardiovascular arterial health. He continues by noting that this concept is very much related to philosophies of freewill and spirituality, but practically, it is about sitting down and getting to know yourself, getting to know yourself in relation to the bigger picture, and “using that knowledge to create goals that are very specific to moving you in a direction that you want your life to go, rather than just being a leaf blown along by the wind.”
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Ultimately, Lester hopes the focus on intentional living in 2025 is a movement that persists to create an overall culture of wellbeing. “What I would love people to understand is that, in a world that makes us feel helpless and small and unimportant…we have the ability to live well. It is within our hands. We have choices that we can make, and each of us can find our way to a more fulfilling life if we accept that what we do—the choices we make, the way we think and speak—matters. Our lives are deeply meaningful, regardless of whether you think you’re important or not.”
