Ask these 3 “Naikan” questions for a happier, healthier attitude toward life

The world doesn’t owe us a thing. When we are born, we are born naked and crying, with nothing at all. Everything and anything that happens to us, and everything we own, and everyone we love, are the happy gifts of the Universe — one with zero obligation to give us what we want.

This fact underpins one of the most important lessons in ancient Stoicism: gratitude. For Epictetus, gratitude is a way to avoid being resentful and bitter. He asks us to imagine life as a banquet. The unhappy person is one who looks jealously at other plates or is angry that they are served last. They feel entitled to food, and their ego is so inflated that they feel they’re due the greatest portions. But Epictetus tells us to wait our turn and to be thankful for whatever our host provides, because it’s more than we had before.

Modern psychology places a lot of weight on these kinds of “gratitude exercises” because gratitude is what allows us to appreciate what we have more deeply, and to appreciate those who gave these things to us. Gratitude is what allows us to put things into perspective and to realize that things perhaps aren’t always that bad.

But one of the most popular examples of a gratitude exercise is a form of therapy that many people haven’t heard about. It’s known as Naikan.

The three questions

Naikan is a form of Japanese Buddhist therapy developed by Ishin Yoshimoto, and the word Naikan means “looking inside” — not in some vague or sentimental way, but rather with structure.

It starts with intention, where you choose someone or something important to you — for example, your spouse, your child, your parent, your community, your job, or whatever. You need to isolate an area of your life you value and to which you want to develop a healthier, happier relationship. And then you ask yourself three questions about that thing.

First, what have I received from them?

Second, what have I given to them?

And third, what troubles or difficulties have I caused them?

That’s it.

Naikan doesn’t ask you to list all of the ways that they have hurt you. It doesn’t wallow in grievances. Instead, you start to see yourself as someone who has received endless, unearned kindness. We remember the meals made without thanks, the teachers who tolerated our foolishness without irritation, and the friends whom we have wronged but never apologized to.

Dependent origination

Naikan is a nod to that Stoic idea of gratitude. It’s where the moral debt flips upside down — where you see the world not in terms of what it owes you or what it’s denied you, but in what it’s given you. But the Buddhist idea at the heart of Naikan is known as “dependent origination.”

Dependent origination is where we recognize that nothing exists independently — everything arises due to conditions, relationships, and causes outside itself. You didn’t create your body, your language, your memories, or even your personality in a vacuum. Everything about you is dependent on what came before and what surrounds you. This idea of dependent origination (or idappaccayatā in Sanskrit) stems from the Buddha’s saying: “‘This is, because that is. This is not, because that is not. This comes to be, because that comes to be. This ceases to be, because that ceases to be.”

What Epictetus and the Buddha both knew was that nothing arises by itself. You are held, shaped, and sustained by a thousand invisible hands. And in a world obsessed with entitlement, Naikan asks us to appreciate what is given to us. It allows us to see others and the world in a much more positive light, and it’s a light that lifts us all up.