A Purpose-driven Life May Be the Key to Improving Our Long-term Health
One of the secrets to longevity, according to Canadian and US psychologists, is having a sense of purpose. As healthspans extend, maintaining purpose will be important for both psychological and physical health. Fortunately, there are many ways to meet this need.
“Finding a direction for life and setting overarching goals for what you want to achieve can help you actually live longer, regardless of when you find your purpose,” says Professor Patrick Hill of Carleton University. “So the earlier someone comes to a direction for life, the earlier these protective effects may be able to occur.”
Hill, together with Nicholas Turiano, of the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York analyzed data from over 6,000 participants who were followed for an average of 14 years. They found that “individuals who reported having a greater purpose in life had a lower mortality risk.” The reason is unclear. Perhaps it’s because those who have purpose tend to take better care of themselves or it might be that having a purpose actually helps to lower levels of stress. On this point, Hill teamed up with Cornell University psychologist Anthony Burrow to publish experimental data pointing to the stress reduction theory.
Burrow put students in a stressful situation and had some of them write about a movie they just saw, while others wrote about their purpose in life. The students that wrote about the movie were stressed, but those who wrote about their purpose were not. While it’s not definitive evidence, Burrow told NPR that his findings lead him to believe that “a sense of purpose may protect people against stress,” and lowering stress may lead to greater longevity. Whatever the case, it’s clear that purpose matters, making things like the Encore.org Purpose Prize important initiatives.
The Purpose Prize was created in 2005 by Encore.org, a non-profit that aims to help people over 60 years old transition to jobs in the nonprofit world and the public sector. The winners of the prize are impressive. Examples include a U.S. Navy veteran who organized volunteers across the country to teach disabled veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan how to combat stress through fly-fishing. Another winner was a public relations executive who helped wounded warriors find and renovate foreclosed homes, and there was even an international public health expert who took on the huge task of eradicating a common parasitic disease through shrimp farming. Changing the world for the better is one way to find purpose that will always offers loads of opportunity. Another way to find purpose is though more traditional means like religion.
One of the goals of religion is to help people find meaning in life. “Supernaturalism is the all-purpose technology,” says Chapman University professor Lawrence Iannaccone, who studies the economics of religion. “You can use it for everything. Just look at how everything people care about is covered in the religious section of bookstores.” The power of religious-driven purpose can also be seen in book sale numbers. For instance Pastor Rick Warren’s book, “The Purpose Driven Life,” has sold over 32 million copies worldwide. “The history of this idea -- 'purpose driven' -- is not something I thought up in the first place,” Warren says. “There have been hundreds of books throughout history that talked about worship, fellowship, discipleship, ministry and evangelism.” True enough, but what Warren did do was put together the ideas in a way that made religion a bit like ‘self-help,’ for which he has been criticized by traditionalists. Polling data also demonstrate the link between religion and purpose.
According to a 2008 Gallup Poll of 84 countries, “respondents who claim affiliation with a religious tradition -- any religious tradition -- are more likely than those who do not to say their lives have an important purpose. Secular respondents are more than twice as likely as those who affiliate with a religion to say they do not feel this way -- 14% vs. 6%, respectively.”
Helping people using one’s talents is one way to find purpose; religion is another. Clearly, there are many ways to find purpose in life, but the key to having a longer life is finding them somehow.