Why Is Life Purpose Important?

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Perhaps you have experienced moments when you felt truly connected, like you were performing a task you were made for—maybe when you were organizing a grassroots campaign, comforting a sick grandchild, or creating a piece of art or music. It is likely that this was a moment of being in harmony with your purpose.  

Living on purpose feels alive, clear, and authentic. You may also experience “flow,” which is a state of total absorption in which time seems to disappear and you feel content and fulfilled.

In short, purpose offers definite emotional and psychological benefits!

Purpose can influence physical health

In addition to the emotional and psychological benefits, having a strong sense of purpose can also help you:

  1. Live longer. A 2009 study of over 73,000 Japanese men and women found that those who had a strong connection to their sense of purpose (which they call ikigai) tended to live longer than those who didn’t. Additionally, in his study of “Blue Zones” (communities in the world in which people are more likely to live past 100), Dan Buettner identified the factors that most centenarians share, one of them being a strong sense of purpose. In 2014, researchers used data that tracked adults over 14 years and found that "having a purpose in life appears to widely buffer against mortality risk across the adult years."
     
  2. Protect against heart disease. Another study in 2008 found that a lower level of purpose in Japanese men was associated with earlier death and cardiovascular disease. More research in this area showed that “purpose is a possible protective factor against near-future myocardial infarction among those with coronary heart disease.”
     
  3. Prevent Alzheimer’s disease. In studies of thousands of elderly subjects, Dr. Patricia Boyle, a neuropsychologist at the Rush Alzheimer’s Disease Center in Chicago, found that people with a low sense of life purpose were 2.4 times more likely to get Alzheimer’s disease than those with a strong purpose. Further, people with purpose were less likely to develop impairments in daily living and mobility disabilities.
     
  4. Handle pain better. Purpose can also positively affect pain management—a study in The Journal of Pain found that women with a stronger sense of purpose were better able to withstand heat and cold stimuli applied to their skin.

Purpose leads to better relationships

Read more about the importance of relationships A 2009 study assessing the purpose of over 1,000 adults found that those with a high sense of meaning in their lives spent more time and attention on their loved ones and communities.

On the whole, people with purpose tend to be more engaged with their families, colleagues, and neighbors, enjoying more satisfying relationships as a result.

The retirement effect

According to Dan Buettner, the two most vulnerable times in a person’s life are the first twelve months after birth and the year following retirement. In fact, you have probably heard stories about perfectly healthy men who died shortly after they retired from a lifelong career. Some researchers suspect that for these men, the end of their career also signified the end of their purpose in life, which affected their health and wellbeing.

A study of retired employees of Shell Oil found that men and women who retired early (age 55) were more likely to die early than those who retired at age 65. A similar study of almost 17,000 healthy Greeks showed that the risk of death increased by 51% after retirement.

These two studies suggest that there may be some risk in only finding meaning in a career. It seems important to reshape life’s big questions and find ways to continue serving purpose even after retirement to improve chances of a longer, healthier life.

Living with purpose promotes resilience

One of the common features among people who live with purpose is that they are able to find meaning in the things that happen to them. Andrew Zolli, author of Resilience, describes these people as being able to “cog­ni­tively reap­praise sit­u­a­tions and reg­u­late emo­tions, turn­ing life’s prover­bial lemons into lemon­ade.” Watch a webinar on how purpose can help you deal with uncertainty

Ed Diener’s extensive research on the science of wellbeing has found that people with a strong sense of purpose are better able to handle the ups and downs of life. Purpose can offer a psychological buffer against obstacles—thus, a person with a strong sense of purpose remains satisfied with life even while experiencing a difficult day. According to Barbara Fredrickson, this kind of long-term resilience can lead to better cardiovascular health, less worry, and greater happiness over time.

hand writing

Write your purpose statement

Explore your purpose by creating one sentence purpose statements.

Try it out

Brainstorm several beginning phases and create one-sentence “draft” purpose statements for yourself.

to awaken to energize to create
to develop to enhance to inspire
to accept to challenge to seek
to heal to act upon to learn
to encourage to ignite to design
to help to organize to teach
to listen to support to empower
to ________ to ________ to _________

Choose one of the above statements and rewrite it in your own words.

My purpose is to…­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­ ­___________________________________

____________________________________________________

____________________________________________________

____________________________________________________

 

Adapted with permission of Inventure-The Purpose Company (www.inventuregroup.com), 2013.

You can also download this exercise as a PDF.

Get in the flow

Perhaps you have had the experience of being totally absorbed in some activity—whether it be sports, cooking, reading, or hiking—so that you completely lost track of time. This concept of being completely present is called “flow,” and scientists claim that it’s a key part of an emotionally healthy life.

Being “caught in the flow” is a fulfilling, pleasurable experience that means you are engaging in a task that challenges and excites you.

Learn more

Get in the flow

To create more flow in your life, happiness researcher Sonja Lyubomirsky recommends the following:

  • Take on new values. Be open to new experiences and learning new skills. Flow arises when you are being challenged; you may find that it requires striving to seek new tasks and challenges.
  • Transform ordinary tasks. You can transform any mundane experience by placing your attention wholeheartedly on what is happening around you. Notice with interest all the details you may usually gloss over—the pattern on the doctor’s office wallpaper, the smell of the breeze, or the texture of a piece of toast as you chew it.
  • Flow with others. It’s easy to let the mind wander when someone else is talking, but one way to engage in “flow conversations” is to practice deeply listening to what other people are saying and to engage fully in what they are feeling, as well as your own reactions and responses.
  • Transform work. People who consider their occupation to be a job rather than a calling tend to find their work to be monotonous, tedious, or a “necessary evil.” But even if you fall in that category, you can maximize positivity at work by cultivating more flow—setting forth new challenges for yourself, accomplishing additional tasks, and seeing yourself as part of an interconnected system working for the benefit of others.

 

Adapted from The How of Happiness by Sonja Lyubomirsky, 2007.

Reviewed by: LeeAnn Melin

Bamia, C., Trichopoulou, A., Trichopoulos, D. (2008). Age at retirement and mortality in a general population sample: the Greek EPIC study. American Journal of Epidemiology; 167 (5): 561-569.

Boyle, P.A., Buchman, A.S., Wilson, R.S., Yu, L., Schneider, J.A., Bennett, D.A. (2012). Effect of purpose in life on the relation between Alzheimer disease pathologic changes on cognitive function in advanced age. Archives of General Psychiatry;69(5):499-505.

Boyle, P.A., Buchman, A.S., Bennett, D.A. (2010). Purpose in life is associated with a reduced risk of incident disability among community-dwelling older persons.  Am J Geriatr Psychiatry; 18(12):1093-1102.

Boyle, P., Buchman, A., Barnes, L., Bennett, D. (2010). Effect of a purpose in life on risk of incident alzheimer disease and mild cognitive impairment in community-dwelling older persons. Archives of General Psychiatry; 67(3): 304–310.

Buettner, D. (2009, September). Dan Buettner: How to live to be 100+ [video file]. Retrieved from http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_buettner_how_to_live_to_be_100.html.

Diener, E. Fujita, F., Tay, L., Biswas-Diener, R. (2012). Purpose, mood, and pleasure in predicting satisfaction judgments. Social Indicators Research; 105(3), 333-341.

Fredrickson, B.L., Cohn, M.A., Coffey, K.A., Pek, J., Finkel, S.M. (2008). Open hearts build lives: positive emotions, induced through loving-kindness meditation, build consequential personal resources. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology;95(5):1045-62.

Hill PL, Turiano NA. (2014). Purpose in Life as a Predictor of Mortality across Adulthood. Psychological science. 25(7):1482-1486.

Koizumi, M., Ito, H., Kaneko, Y., Motohashi, Y. (2008). Effect of having a sense of purpose in life on the risk of death from cardiovascular diseases. Journal of Epidemiology;18(5):191-6.

MetLife Mature Market Institute. (2009). Discovering what matters: balancing money, medicine, and meaning. Westport, CT: Leider, Richard.

Nakamura, J., Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2002). The concept of flow. In Snyder, C.R., and Lopez, S.J. (eds.). Handbook of Positive Psychology (pp. 459-71). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Smith, B. W., Tooley, E. M., Montague, E. Q., Robinson, A. E., Cosper, C. J., & Mullins, P. G. (2009). The role of resilience and purpose in life in habituation to heat and cold pain. The Journal of Pain : Official Journal of the American Pain Society, 10(5), 493-500.

Tanno, K., Sakata, K., Ohsawa, M., Onoda, T., Itai, K., Yaegashi, Y., Tamakoshi, A.; JACC Study Group. (2009). Associations of ikigai as a positive psychological factor with all-cause mortality and cause-specific mortality among middle-aged and elderly Japanese people: findings from the Japan Collaborative Cohort Study. Journal of Psychosomatic Research; 67(1):67-75.

Tsai, S. P., Wendt, J. K., Donnelly, R. P., de Jong, G., & Ahmed, F. S. (2005). Age at retirement and long term survival of an industrial population: Prospective cohort study. BMJ (Clinical Research Ed.), 331(7523), 995.