Those individuals often turned their efforts inward to become better human beings, learning new skills or tackling long-held emotional struggles. As Damon explains, the pause of retirement and an empty nest can be an invitation to introspection, in ways that weren’t possible in our chaotic midlives, and a reconnection with the things that truly matter. Also, there was a lot of agreement on what sources of purpose went along with more meaning, happiness, or psychological richness in life.
Seven Ways to Find Your Purpose in Life
“Though the goal of our paper was to highlight many sources of purpose, our take-home message is that having any kind of purpose is key to having a good life,” says Heine. A new study suggests that a sense of purpose may be more important to our longevity than life satisfaction. This is a valuable reflective process to all people, but Amber took it one step further, by publishing her autobiography and turning it into a tool for social change. Today, Amber’s purpose is to help people like her feel less alone.
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But, he adds, they can’t say more without getting more granular detail in future studies. Mask wonders if it could be due to how different cultures think about family as a source of purpose, which their general survey couldn’t detect. While the overall results suggest an almost universal experience of purpose, there were some cultural variations in the findings, too. Please answer the questions below as honestly as possible; there are no right or wrong answers. The last seven questions are about you, and will be used to explore how purpose relates to factors like age and gender. Individual responses to this quiz are anonymous and will not be shared.
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- Many people I interviewed for this article mentioned pivotal books or ideas they found in books.
- For older adults, a one-point difference in purpose can mean a 22 percent decreased risk of having a stroke.
- However, says Bronk, older folks may want to reflect back rather than look ahead.
- If we need help, a survey like the VIA Character Strengths Survey can be useful in identifying our personal strengths and embracing them more fully.
- However, sometimes looking at these larger-than-life examples can be too intimidating, says Bronk.
Researchers have discovered that a sense of purpose is linked to a number of good outcomes, across the lifespan, for both individuals and organizations. Like happiness, purpose is not a destination, but a journey and a practice. That means it’s accessible at any age, if we’re willing to explore what matters to us and what kind of person we want to be—and act to become that person. As we’ve seen, we can have multiple purposes that rise and fall in importance over our lifetime, as schedules are juggled and priorities shift. When we face transitions, whether it’s changing careers, going through divorce or illness, or hitting a milestone birthday, we may be prompted to slow down, reflect, and reprioritize. While society might be telling them to relax and enjoy their golden years, he says, many older adults just feel adrift.
Often, finding our purpose involves a combination of finding meaning in the experiences we’ve had, while assessing our values, skills, and hopes for a better world. It means taking time for personal reflection while imagining our ideal future. A new study suggests that even across cultures, there is a lot of similarity in where humans find purpose in life and how it brings us fulfillment. When education professional Paul LeBuffe found out that he was raising a special-needs child, it was a turning point for his family and his career—and his sense of purpose. Since then, he has been working to promote resilience in children and adults, and within his own family.
As we see in Dani’s case, we can often find our sense of purpose in the people around us. “It may seem counterintuitive to foster purpose by cultivating a grateful mindset, but it works,” writes psychologist Kendall Bronk, a leading expert on purpose. The writing of historian W.E.B. Du Bois pushed social-justice activist Art McGee to embrace a specific vision of African-American identity and liberation. Journalist Michael Stoll found inspiration in the “social responsibility theory of journalism,” which he read about at Stanford University. “Basically, reporters and editors have not just the ability but also the duty to improve their community by being independent arbiters of problems that need solving,” he says. “It’s been my professional North Star ever since.” Spurred by this idea, Michael went on to launch an award-winning nonprofit news agency called The San Francisco Public Press.
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However, says Bronk, older folks may want to reflect back rather than look ahead. She suggests we think about what we’ve always wanted to do but maybe couldn’t because of other obligations (like raising kids or pursuing a career). Bronk found that helping people prioritize their values is useful for finding purpose. For example, watching a beautiful sunset or a starlit sky, witnessing people doing supremely moral acts, encountering deep states of meditation, or seeing incredible architecture or art can all inspire awe.
Contemplating conflicting views like these, Heine suggests, help us clarify our own beliefs about life’s bigger questions. And, he adds, psychological science can help explain why we have this urge to see our lives as coherent and meaningful. If they aren’t, we’ll experience unpleasant cognitive dissonance and try to resolve that, somehow. Knowing that certain elements of a good life may be supported by sources of purpose like mattering, inner peace, or service could be useful to know, especially if we’re aiming for a happier, more meaningful, or psychologically rich life. But Heine is not sure that there can be a “purpose prescription” based on their findings alone. Studies like these show the potential positive impacts of purpose, which, Strecher argues, should encourage us to consider promoting it in our schools and workplaces.
It includes Strecher’s personal revelations as well as those of others who’ve found their purpose and changed the trajectory of their lives. One 2008 study found that those who see meaning and purpose in their lives are able to tell a story of change and growth, where they managed to overcome the obstacles they encountered. In other words, creating a narrative like Amber’s can help us to see our own strengths and how applying those strengths can make a difference in the world, which increases our sense of self-efficacy. Interestingly, gratitude and altruism seem to work together to generate meaning and purpose. In a second experiment, the researchers randomly assigned some participants to write letters of gratitude—and those people later reported a stronger sense of purpose. More recent work by Christina Karns and colleagues found that altruism and gratitude are neurologically linked, activating the same reward circuits in the brain.
Reflect on what matters most
Learn how CMC Markets Review poetry can help your brain handle stress, process feelings, and spark insight. Why do people like Kezia and Christopher seem to find purpose in suffering—while others are crushed by it? Part of the answer, as we’ll see next, might have to do with the emotions and behaviors we cultivate in ourselves.
Purpose may be more elusive than we realize—perhaps the culmination of a lifetime of personal interactions and individual experiences—and may be next to impossible to foster in the general public. Compared to a control group, women who’d received the meditation training did indeed have longer telomeres at the end of the retreat, suggesting better health. But the researchers found that this effect was accounted for not by increases in mindfulness, as expected, but by increases in a sense of life purpose, which the meditation inspired. Although there is no research that directly explores how being thanked might fuel a sense of purpose, we do know that gratitude strengthens relationships—and those are often the source of our purpose, as many of these stories suggest. Of course, finding purpose is not just an intellectual pursuit; it’s something we need to feel. That’s why it can grow out of suffering, both our own and others’.
To find out—and discover steps for strengthening it—take this quiz, which is primarily based on the Claremont Purpose Scale developed by psychologists Kendall Bronk, Brian Riches, and Susan Mangan. Victor Strecher, a behavioral scientist at the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health, lost his 19-year-old daughter to a sudden heart attack in 2010; she had been living with a rare heart condition for years. Her fragility and eventual death upended his thoughts on what life should be about and how to live it—and it moved him to write a book called Life on Purpose. When Christopher Pepper was a senior in high school, a “trembling, tearful friend” told him that she had been raped by a classmate.
- Here are six ways to overcome isolation and discover your purpose in life.
- Working in that field means he’s always learning things he can apply to his own life, which helps give him a sense of balance.
- A new sense of purpose came with the new community and identity she helped to build, of gay and lesbian Christians.
This “is a project that endures across the lifespan,” as purpose expert Kendall Bronk and her colleagues write in a 2009 paper. If we’re able to revisit and renew our sense of purpose as we navigate milestones and transitions, suggests this research, then we can look forward to more satisfying, meaningful lives. A simple exercise of writing about what you value and why it’s important has been found to benefit people in many situations, writes Heine. He points to studies suggesting that doing so can help people change their lifestyle in healthy ways, do better in school when disadvantaged, and accept their choices in life and their mortality more easily. As Heine writes, the search for meaning is an inherent part of being human.
All responses are anonymized and only used in aggregate for evaluation purposes. A new book makes the case that hope is the right response when we are facing difficulties in our lives. Studies are investigating the process of leaving religion and what a flourishing life after religion looks like.
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For older adults, a one-point difference in purpose can mean a 22 percent decreased risk of having a stroke. The purpose that came from Amber’s parents was based on exclusion, as she discovered. There was no place—and no purpose—for her in that community once she embraced an identity they couldn’t accept.
The length of mothers’ telomeres—the end caps on genes that tend to shorten with age—were measured before and after some of the moms attended a mindful meditation retreat. It’s not enough to just feel like you’re a small part of something big; you also need to feel driven to make a positive impact on the world. This helps young people try something on for size, see if they like it, and then decide if they want to make it part of their life. Unfortunately so many young people today are not actually able to explore—teens are often either disillusioned from the banality of school or over achieving students are on the treadmill and cannot step off for fear of falling behind.
