Peter Quarry is a multi-award-winning psychologist and speaker whose book, If I Were You – A psychologist puts himself on the couch is available in all good bookstores and online. LinkedIn: @PeterQuarry | www.peterquarry.com

Socrates famously said  “an unexamined life is not worth living”.

He’ll be happy to know that I fully agree with him!

As a psychologist of over 40 years, I believe it is a good idea, from time to time, to step back from the bustle of daily life and take a good hard look at your self and your life – to ‘examine’ it. To ask yourself some deep and meaningful questions.How’s it going? Am I living the life I want to lead? What have a learned so far? What do I want to change, going forward?

This is an exercise you can do on milestone birthdays (30, 40 50, etc), or after a major change in your life (job loss, relationship breakdown, illness) or whenever you feel that life just isn’t working the way you want.

I have found doing a Life Review can lead to 3 major mental health benefits:

First, doing a Life Review allows you to make peace with the past. Many people have had difficult childhoods, possibly coming from broken families or abusive environments. Some had problems at school, getting bullied or dealing with their identities or sexuality. Perhaps early relationships didn’t work out. The effects f these traumas can be long lasting!

I had particularly challenging time when I was young. My father died when I was 3 and my mother, who had lost a child at birth before I came along, was way over protective of me. On top of all that, she couldn’t decide where to live, so I spent a good part of my childhood on the road.

For a long time, I felt angry and resentful about my childhood. “Why me? Why did MY father had to die? Why couldn’t I have had a normal childhood?” These feelings of victimhood spilled over into my adult life.

It was not until I did my Life Review, that I was able to look back and understand and forgive my parents – they did the best they could! But more significantly, I used a psychological technique called ‘reframing’ to look at that period differently. Instead of feeling a victim, I realized that the difficulties I encountered as a child taught me resilience and adaptability – two life skills that have helped me immensely in later years.

So, doing a Life Review helped me put those old ‘victim’ ghosts to bed and feel better about my past.

A second benefit of doing a Life Review is that you get to learn about who you are now. You start to understand yourself better – your warts and all! You come to see how you operate, what your ‘hot buttons’ are, and how others experience you.

There is a mountain of psychological research that shows that people with higher levels of this self-awareness, or insight, do better at school and work, have more satisfying relationships, and are better leaders. In other words, have better lives!

Finally, reviewing your life, no matter what your age, allows you to make changes going forward. When you have a deeper understanding of your past, and a clearer picture of who you are now, you can think more accurately about your desired future. What do you want to do more of and less of? What patterns of behaviour or thinking do you need to alter? What goals do you cherish that are yet to be fulfilled?

There are many ways to plan for an alternative future, including doing bucket lists and setting SMART objectives. One technique I used in my Life Review was to write the story of the next chapter of my life, from the perspective of me at a later date. So, at 65, I imagined that I was 80 looking back over the previous 15 years. It was an extraordinary exercise that helped me pinpoint some crucial changes that I wanted to make, as I get older.

Jane Fonda popularized the idea of doing a Life Review. Doing it for herself, she describes achieving a peace and self-awareness that she’d never experienced before, as well as identifying “regrets that need attention and dreams yet to be fulfilled.”

No matter what your age, taking the time to examine your life can help heal old wounds, deepen your self-knowledge and provide opportunities to make improvements, large or small.

My experience of doing a Life Review surprised me immensely. I now feel more grounded, calmer, accepting of myself and more confident about the future.

After the last two years of pandemic madness, that’s not a bad place to be!