Dr. Gordon Flett

Mattering is something that cuts across virtually everything we do and everything we have in our lives in terms of our thoughts, our feelings, but also our roles and our relationships.

And, you know, I think daily it's something that we experience either in terms of that feeling of mattering or not mattering.

so to me the bottom line is that when you're thinking about mattering and somebody has a deep sense of mattering that they are somebody who is filled with hope as well that's the key thing from a person's perspective it goes along with a lot of other positive things and it's very strongly related to hope so somebody who has this sense has got a lot of positive resources they could bring up when they need it absolutely and you coined the term anti-mattering also what is that

Antimattering is the flip side.

It's that time when you feel like you're invisible.

People are going out of their way to make you feel unimportant, insignificant.

And it can be very deep in terms of a soul-based thing where if you chronically are experiencing this, you're feeling you've got

You're not being seen, you don't have a voice.

And, you know, unfortunately, this is something that's related to epidemics that we have right now.

We talk about the loneliness epidemic, the social media addiction epidemic.

I think they're all focusing on that need to matter.

And sadly, anti-mattering is very robustly correlated so that if you feel like you don't matter and it's chronic, you also have that strong sense of being alone and lonely.

I'm so glad you asked that.

First, the morality, there is that subset of people Jenny referred to.

That goes right back to the very first thing that was written about matter and the idea that if I can't get my sense of feeling important from these people, I'll get them from these perhaps less desirable people.

longevity part is key.

And that's the one thing I'd really like to underscore for your listeners and your viewers is that there's about 10 studies now that link mattering with better self-reported health.

And two of them involve objective measures so that you'll see a link with blood pressure, heart rate, positive chemicals versus the negative chemicals.

And that's now been implicated as well in terms of

quicker aging and mortality.