We can find the concepts of practicing intentionality and being consumed reflected in various aspects of human behavior, cognition, and emotional well-being in psychology. By understanding how these two psychologically grounded concepts may show up in your daily life, you can gain valuable insights into how you may effectively lead your life. Here's a breakdown of how to practice intentionality and how being consumed shows up in our lives.

Practice of Intentionality:

Clarity of Purpose: In order to practice intentionality, you must first have clarity on your purpose for life. Define what success means to you, both in your personal life and career. Dig in deeper to understand why you believe these are the definitions of success in your personal life and career. Make sure these definitions are truly your own. If they are the definitions or expectations that have been planted in your head by family, friends, community, society, or culture, they may lead you down a path of disillusionment. These definitions must effectively represent why you exist in this world and meaningfully define the legacy of your life.

Critical examination of your “Why” will provide the clarity you need to practice intentionality aligned to your purpose and thrive freely, without the self-imposed limitations or burdens from external expectations.

Mindful Decision-Making: Once you have defined your purpose with clarity, you can be mindful of all the decisions you make to ensure they are intentionally aligned to your purpose. The decisions we are tasked with making in our personal and professional life are anything but simple. Take your time to consider the implications of your choices on your life, career, and well-being. If you do take the time to think through your decisions and ensure they are effectively aligned to your purpose and meaningfully grounded in your personal brand value, you will be able to stand by your decisions with a deeper level of conviction due to the intentionality you put into those decisions.

Quality over Quantity: Practicing intentionality typically requires prioritizing quality over quantity. You will focus on healthy relationships, meaningful experiences, and purposeful pursuits. Your intentionality will encourage you to operate from a minimalist mindset, valuing deep work and growth over shallow or performative work.

Goal-Directed Behavior: In psychology, intentionality often aligns with goal-directed behavior. Once you intentionally set clear goals aligned to your purpose, then your work towards those goals will exhibit purposeful actions. The psychological concept of goal setting, motivation, and the pursuit of personal aspirations will be accomplished through your intentional actions.

Cognitive Control: When you practice intentionality, you will demonstrate higher levels of cognitive control. Your capacity to regulate your thoughts, attention, and impulses will increase, leading to more frequent mindful decision-making. This is also related to executive functions, which involve processes like working memory, inhibition, and cognitive flexibility.

Self-Determination Theory: The Self-Determination Theory in psychology emphasizes the importance of autonomy, competence, and relatedness for cultivating intrinsic motivation and well-being of self. As you practice intentionality, aligning your actions with your purpose and personal brand values, you will pursue actions that fulfill these psychological needs.

Mindfulness Practices: Mindfulness allows you to be fully present and aware, empowering you to make choices based on conscious awareness grounded in intrinsic motivations rather than automatic reactions to extrinsic score cards. This practice is rooted in psychological principles and associated with intentional living. Practicing mindfulness has well-documented positive benefits on mental health, stress reduction, and overall well-being.

Sustainable Happiness: Pursuing your intrinsic goals, grounded in your personal brand values, and aligned with your purpose, rather than extrinsic validation or materialistic gains, is linked to experiencing happiness over a long period of time. When you practice intentionality, you will experience a sustainable sense of well-being in depth. Wouldn’t you want to experience happiness longer and more frequently?

Being Consumed:

Reactive Behavior: Without clear intentionality, you risk reacting to external expectations, pressures, and demands without thoughtful consideration.

You will feel overwhelmed and as though your life is spiraling out of control. The behaviors of those who are experiencing a sense of being consumed often reflect a reactive mindset, where they respond impulsively to external stimuli without critical thinking or mindful consideration.

Quantity over Quality: In contrast to practicing intentionality, being consumed typically prioritizes quantity, short-term driven actions, accumulating materialistic possessions, transactional relationships, and instant gratification driven experiences. This may lead to a path of shallowness and unfulfillment.

Cognitive Load and Distraction: Being consumed will increase your cognitive load and distractibility. Your cognitive functioning will be negatively impacted by constant multitasking and information overload. How attentional resources are distributed, and the way cognitive overload can debilitate decision-making and problem-solving have been explored in cognitive psychology.

When you are being consumed, you may also experience being constantly distracted by technology, information, shallow work, or other external factors. Being consumed and distracted will hinder you from pursuing personal growth and meaningful goals.

Hedonic Treadmill: If you frequently engage in social comparison, seeking external validation as a measure of your self-worth, you may be experiencing a sense of being consumed. Social comparison theory and the need for affiliation in social psychology concepts can shed light on how you may be assessing yourself based on external validation markers. Consumed individuals may find themselves struggling on the "hedonic treadmill". This phenomenon describes individuals who constantly pursue external validations for their happiness. This pursuit leads to a sense of emptiness, unfulfillment, and even despair.

Strained Relationships: When you are consumed, you may prioritize shallow work and external demands over investing in meaningful relationships, which will destroy personal connections.

Unhealthy social isolation and strained relationships can lead you to feelings of loneliness and harmful impact on your mental health. Strong and healthy social support is critical in anyone’s psychological well-being, especially in today’s society.

Loss of Personal Identity: If you are constantly experiencing being consumed, you may risk losing a sense of who you are. When external validations, performative work, superficial rewards, and expectations of others consume you, it is difficult to ground yourself in your personal values and purpose. Lack of clarity and intentionality will lead you to emptiness, confusion, self-doubt, and fear. Not knowing your true self may jeopardize your psychological health.

Failure to Address Underlying Issues: There is no shortage of self-help books, experts, videos, apps, and programs in our world today. There can be such a thing as too much of a good thing. Vast amounts of options and resources can be overwhelming. If you are chasing the latest and the greatest in current trends, you can be consumed by the offerings. This can confuse and distract you from your purpose. Also, solely focusing on surface-level, shallow, and performative self-help resources may overlook underlying recurring issues that create the majority of symptomatic evidence you are forced to react to. This type of superficial work without intentionality may provide instant gratification of a false sense of improvement. Failure to dig into the root causes with intentionality may hinder your pursuit of genuine well-being.

Why Practicing Intentionality is Important in Today’s World:

As we navigate the complexities of modern life, we face challenges never seen before. Technology is the main catalyst for modern amenities and privileges, but it also causes harmful side effects with dire consequences for individuals, families, and societies. Practicing intentionality is critically important in today's fast-paced and interconnected global village.

Overwhelmed and Overloaded with Information: We live in a digital age, where we are constantly bombarded with data, news, information, and triggers, leading us to feel overwhelmed. Even if we are selective and do our best to find the good in all that hits our phone, TV, computer, and tablets, it can easily consume us. Practicing intentionality can help you filter through the noise, prioritize relevant information, make mindful decisions, and take meaningful actions aligned with your purpose in life. Prevent cognitive overload and burnout by injecting a healthy dosage of intentionality in your daily life.

Technology and Distraction: We simply can’t imagine a life without our smartphone. The constant presence of smartphones can be intrusive and hinder our ability to experience peace of mind. The digital devices have dramatically increased distractions and decreased attention spans for all of us, especially our children. Doing nothing is almost impossible in today’s world. I encourage you to intentionally disconnect and schedule a time on your calendar to simply do nothing. Allow space and silence in your mind and heart. You may be amazed with what you may see, hear, and feel in the absence of technology.

Social Comparison and FOMO: In the palm of our hands, we can click and swipe to instantly see how people live all over the world. While this is an amazing power, it can also set us up to fail. The overload of external validations, societal norms, cultural pressure, and superficial artifacts of success has consumed us. For some, this has conditioned them to constantly seek external validation for their self-worth. Practicing intentionality helps you resist external pressures and make choices that are aligned to your purpose and grounded in your personal brand. When intentionality is built into how you live every day, FOMO is not a factor for you because you are present in every moment you intentionally created and experienced.

Old School Relationships in the Digital Age: Technology and digital communication have drastically changed how we interact with each other. While the convenient and fast virtual connections may help increase our efficiency, the depth and quality of our connections may be suffering.

Let’s be intentional about the type of relationships we want to cultivate and nurture:

• When possible, invest the time to meet in person.

• Practice active listening. Really listen with an open mind and heart.

• Be kind with your words. Unintentional choice of words still harms. Be thoughtful.

• Written words are efficient but spoken words filled with tone, rhythm, flow, and laughter can change the trajectory of someone’s day and even their life.

• Tough conversations build humility, patience, understanding, and bridges.

Work-Life Harmony: Work-life balance is not real. It is impossible to sustainably maintain the perfect balance between work and life. Instead, practice intentionality in creating and nurturing harmony among all the important things in our lives beyond just work and life: school, kids, passion, hobbies, friends, volunteering, etc. When you are intentional about maintaining a greater harmony with many elements, you intrinsically understand the give-and-take aspect built into nature. Sometimes you have to invest more into work, sometimes you focus more at home. Sometimes you set aside special time for yourself to live out your passion, and sometimes you enroll in a program that will enlighten you. You prioritize people, activities, and events that are aligned with your purpose in life. When you are intentionally investing your time in actions you have mindfully chosen, you gain an elevated level of understanding to lead your life. This will also help you get out of the daily grind of sweating the small stuff.

By using a psychological lens to examine the concepts of practicing intentionality, being consumed, and how they may show up in your daily life, I hope you gained valuable insights into how you can navigate through your beliefs, thoughts, emotions, and behaviors to live intentionally aligned to your purpose in life. The various theories from positive psychology, cognitive psychology, and motivation theory may equip you with a comprehensive understanding to avoid being consumed and practice intentionality.

As we lead ourselves, families, team members, students, and staff through the changing complexities of modern life, let us strive for intentionality. Empowering ourselves with intentionality in our beliefs, decisions, and actions will lead us to live a purposeful life with meaning, happiness, and fulfillment.

What one intentional decision or action will you make today?