Table of Contents
*This post may contain affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
No one lives a perfect life, but living a life in which you are satisfied and happy is easy. You make the choice each day to live a life that’s positive, productive, and filled with well-being. Once you learn to master the art of choosing happiness, you learn to appreciate your life by focusing on what you have in your life rather than what you do not have in your life. The satisfaction with life scale may not make your life better, but it helps you gain some powerful insight into how you feel about your life, what it means to you, and where you can focus to make the necessary improvements in life.
The satisfaction with life scale is one many people are interested in learning more about, and it’s quite simple. It’s a series of five statements you rate. These questions make you pause and look deeper into your life and how you feel about it. If you feel strongly either way about the vast majority of the statements made, you gain insight into how you feel about your life that’s easy to read. If you’re somewhere in the middle with your agreement, you might pause to consider how you can change how you feel. This simple questionnaire will not change your life, but it can help you determine where you need to focus your attention to live more intentionally.
What Is the Satisfaction with Life Scale?
The satisfaction with life scale is five statements. You read each one, consider it carefully, and then state how you feel about each statement. There are seven options for you to choose when you respond to each statement.
1 is strongly disagree
2 is disagree
3 is slightly disagree
4 is neither agreeor disagree
5 is slightly agree
6 is agree
7 is strongly agree
The statements are as follows.
- In most ways my life is close to my ideal
- The conditions of my life are excellent
- I am satisfied with life
- So far I’ve gotten the important things I want in life
- If I could live my life over, I would change almost nothing
When using the satisfaction with life scale, your job is to read each statement. Do you agree or disagree, or do you fall somewhere in the middle of each statement? Once you have your answers, read them back and decide how you feel about that. If you strongly agree that you would change most things in your life, you might want to focus on thinking about how you can change that. What can do you do in the future to make it better? The test is typically administered within the psychological community. Once your responses are notated, they are added up to determine your points.
Rating the Satisfaction With Life Scale Answers
Everyone’s answers are rated by being added using a scale of 5 to 35. Those who have a lower score of 5 to 9 are considered extremely dissatisfied with their lives. Those who score 31 to 35 are extremely satisfied with their lives. Those who fall into the middle fall into the middle of those ratings. This is a simple way that psychologists help determine aspects such as the likelihood of suicide and other serious health problems in people.
How Can You Use It in Your Life?
The satisfaction with life scale might not look like much to you, but it’s a useful tool for many. This scale helps you learn to rate your life and how you feel. You can use this scale in your own life to pinpoint where you find your satisfaction.
Use The Scale To Determine Your Satisfaction With Your Dreams
Everyone has dreams, and they develop those dreams as they grow up. You might start your life dreaming about how you will be the best mom in the world or how you will start a successful business. Your dreams might be a little less specific, but they might include growing up and traveling the world. You have those dreams most of your life. You can figure out if you are satisfied with your life by agreeing or disagreeing with the fact that your life is close to ideal.Did you meet your dreams? Are you doing what you love? Are your living your life your own way? If you are not, you can use this answer to delve deeper to figure out how you can make the appropriate changes to find a life you love.
Use The Scale To Make Positive Changes
You’re feeling dissatisfied. Perhaps you are in a funk and you’re not sure how you got there. Perhaps you’re in a negative mood all the time, and you feel unhappy. Take this test and look honestly at your answers. Are you really dissatisfied with your life? Why? What makes you feel dissatisfied? Is it because you aren’t happy in your marriage, in your career, in the conditions of your life? Figure out what it is you disagree with, and then make a list of different ways you can overcome those feelings.
Use The Scale To Get the Help You Need
You might tell yourself you are happy, but you might not be. Use this scale to be honest with yourself. You might not need this scale to tell you that you’re unhappy with life, but is your unhappiness more than that? Are you living a great life with no real reason to feel sad or dissatisfied? It might be a health problem you’re suffering from that makes you feel this way. Use this test to determine if you might need to speak with a professional about how you feel to get treatment for your issues.
How Can Implementing the Satisfaction with Life Scale into Your Life Improve Your Overall Well-being?
There’s nothing easy about looking at your life and realizing that you’re not happy with it as a whole or even with just a few aspects of your life. However, it’s possible you can use the satisfaction with life scale to determine where you need to gain perspective to help you improve your well-being.
Accept The Emotions You Feel
When you take this test, you don’t know what you might find out. For example, if you look at your answers and it says you strongly agree that you would go back in life and change most things, you may realize at that moment that the first thing you would change is your marriage. It’s just an example, but realizing that you wish you’d never married your spouse means you aren’t happy in your marriage.
Now accept that emotion. You have to accept the hard reality that you are unhappily married, and you have to decide how to fix that. Is it through marriage counseling and making an effort to find that happiness again, or is it through the dissolution of your marriage? You have to accept what you feel to really improve your well-being.
Live In the Present
One way to use this scale is to make sure you’re living in the present. Are your dissatisfied emotions coming from a place where you feel as if you are unhappy about things such as your past? This scale can help you realize this so you’re able to focus more on the present. Focusing on now rather than what you cannot change is a key to happiness.
Practice Gratitude
One way the satisfaction with life scale can help you improve your well-being is by implementing it to change your gratitude attitude. If you’re a negative person, you focus on the negatives in your life. If you are a positive person, you focus on the positives. You have the power to look at what is good in your life rather than what is not, but it’s up to you to do that.
Learn to Become Introspective
When your life isn’t what you thought, you can learn to become introspective by taking this assessment. It helps you look at you rather than the world around you. It helps you figure out how you feel rather than how you feel the world wants you to feel. When you learn to be introspective, you learn to focus on what makes you happy, what makes you sad, and how your personal decisions and the world around you affects you. It helps you focus on being present, being you, and being better.
Conclusion
Answering five questions about your life is not going to change your life. However, considering your answers and learning from them will help you change your life. You can use the satisfaction with life scale to figure out what you don’t like about your life versus what you do like, and it can help you learn to focus more on what you appreciate so you can bring more of that into your life. This test is not meant to make you feel as if you’ve failed. It’s a test that’s designed to help you feel good about making positive changes in your future.
