Kristen Hamling: If our buckets runneth over

SPLASH HAPPY: You can fill your life's buckets with friends, family and fun.A-040115BF10

I wrote last week about buckets. Not the kind you find at Mitre 10 - although they do have some very nice buckets - but as an analogy for wellbeing.

For instance, think of all the big things that make up your life, and then imagine them as individual buckets. You would have buckets for health, work, relationships, children, parents, community, study, pets, yourself and so on.

You probably have some buckets that are well and truly full and some buckets that are pretty empty. One way to think about how to achieve happiness and wellbeing is to invest your time and energy into topping up each of your buckets on a regular basis.

That way, when one of your buckets empties - let's say you've had a tough time at work and you are feeling a bit burnt out - you won't topple over. You still have enough balance, because you have full buckets elsewhere.

I've noticed for a long time that when people invest all of their time and energy into one or two buckets of their life, they become unbalanced. If something goes wrong with these buckets and they are empty, then there is nothing left to buffer them. This is when I have seen people become vulnerable to things like depression and anxiety.

On the flip side, I see people who take the time to top up all the important buckets of life and reap the rewards of happiness and wellbeing. In all honesty, I've seen this more in Wanganui than anywhere else that I have lived - people here seem to have sport buckets, family buckets, work buckets, hobby buckets, community buckets, and many people have overflowing relationship buckets.

In wellbeing research, a consistent finding about what contributes most to health and happiness is social connections. People will pretty much always identify that time with family and friends is what most makes them happy.

Perhaps this is the reason why the people of Wanganui so easily rally around those in need, helping to soften the blow of cancer, helping out a single parent or raising money for a family in need. We take the time to fill each other up.

My final and most important point about buckets, is what are you going to do when they are all pretty much full?

It is my belief that if your buckets are all full, then you have an obligation to help others whose buckets are not so full. This might be cooking a meal for a friend, spending some time with a lonely neighbour or something more elaborate, like fostering a child.

In doing so, we gain a heck of lot of feel-good emotions from helping others, you strengthen your relationships with others and so create a stronger community. I see this all happening on the Pay It Forward Wanganui group on Facebook.

So perhaps we ought to consider the question a little more often: "What will you do when your buckets are full?"

-A registered psychologist with a masters in applied psychology, Wanganui mother-of-two Kristen Hamling is studying for a PhD in wellbeing at Auckland University of Technology.