How does having purpose in life impact your health?

What is purpose in life?

The research suggests that purpose in life predicts both health and longevity suggesting that the ability to find meaning from life’s experiences, especially when confronting life’s challenges, may be a mechanism underlying resilience. Having purpose in life may motivate reframing stressful situations to deal with them more productively, thereby facilitating recovery from stress and trauma. In turn, enhanced ability to recover from negative events may allow a person to achieve or maintain a feeling of greater purpose in life over time. Recent evidence suggests that relative to other dimensions of well-being, purpose in life appears to be particularly important in predicting future health and mortality.

Besides healthier biomarker levels, slowed effects of aging, and increased longevity, higher levels of psychological well-being have also been associated with lower rates of depression [3,4,11], with the dimension of purpose in life consistently showing negative relations with depressive symptomatology.

Schaefer, Morozink Boylan, J., van Reekum, C. M., Lapate, R. C., Norris, C. J., Ryff, C. D., & Davidson, R. J. (2013).

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