However, research indicates that people who report having a strong sense of meaning in life are better able to cope with these mentally and physically taxing experiences. Meaning motivates. It makes people want to productively move forward in life. Meaning Reduces the Risk of Mental Illness: Many studies indicate that people who believe their lives are full of meaning and purpose are less likely to suffer from mental illnesses such as depression and anxiety disorders and less inclined to engage in problematic behavior such as excessive drinking.
And studies show that when people do struggle from mental illness, finding meaning can improve the effectiveness of therapeutic interventions. Meaning not only helps people cope with difficulties in life, it also promotes psychological health. Meaning Contributes to Successful Aging: A number of studies have established a strong link between meaning in life and quality of life among older adults.
Older adults who perceive their lives as meaningful are physically and mentally healthier than those who perceive their lives as having little or no meaning. Meaning in life is also associated with decreased fear of death among older adults. Meaning Reduces the Risk of Mortality: Emerging research further highlights the importance of meaning by revealing that people who report having a strong sense of purpose in life live longer.
In fact, across all adult age groups, purpose is associated with mortality. Even among young adults, the greater your sense of purpose, the less likely you are to die.
A Growing Field This is just a small sample of the ever-growing scientific literature on the psychology of meaning. It was too warm and fuzzy. But as the field continues to evolve and thrive as a science-based enterprise, researchers are beginning to feel more comfortable using the tools of science to explore fundamental questions about our existential nature.
Humans are meaning-making animals and scientists are just now beginning to fully understand just how important the meaning motive is for adaptive functioning. The views expressed are those of the author s and are not necessarily those of Scientific American. He is a leading expert in the area of experimental existential psychology. He regularly publishes his work in the top psychology journals, recently co-edited a book on the scientific study of meaning in life, and authored the book Nostalgia: A Psychological Resource.
He also regularly serves as an expert guest on national and international radio programs. The New Yorker. Routledge writes a popular online column for Psychology Today called More Than Mortal, has served as a guest blogger for Scientific American, and frequently serves as a guest expert for national and international radio programs.
You need action on the ground to accompany that discourse. That may be so, but it needs showing. But this need not, and generally will not, be the case. Static typing is done as soon as needed, but not before. This avoids the need for a local refinement of the trajectory. The 50 rai permitting threshold therefore needs to be reduced. The intentions of policy thus need to be seen against the plans rather than the outcomes. See all examples of need. These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web.
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Need a translator? Translator tool. What is the pronunciation of need? Browse nectarine. Test your vocabulary with our fun image quizzes. Image credits. Word of the Day sweetheart. Blog Outsets and onsets! Read More. November 08, To top. Sign up for free and get access to exclusive content:. Free word lists and quizzes from Cambridge. Tools to create your own word lists and quizzes. Word lists shared by our community of dictionary fans. Sign up now or Log in. Definitions Clear explanations of natural written and spoken English.
Click on the arrows to change the translation direction. Follow us. We often find meaning through family and friends. We can find meaning at work, though this may depend on our jobs and the quality of our leaders. We know that our lives are limited, and the thought of non-existence makes us think about what our life means.
Such thoughts can easily lead us to seek meaning beyond humanity, in religion and universal principles. When we cannot find meaning, we will create it, even finding meaning where there is essentially none. We also attribute meaning when things go wrong, blaming fate, luck or God. It has been said that if God did not exist, then we would invent him. Meaning is often socially constructed and shared. We accept meaning from others and offer our own interpretation. Meaning is a production, a design that fits in with other meaning.
It creates our world. Meaning may be deeply cultural and those who do not share our meanings may be considered foolish or bad. Eric Fromm stressed the importance of meaning in human life and suggested that feeling alienated from others and mindlessly feeling, thinking, and acting during daily and work activities reduces our ability to find life meaningful. He felt that the biggest difference between those who did and did not survive the horrific camps was not how much they were forced to work, how little they had to eat, or how exposed to the elements they were everyone had to work to exhaustion, no one had enough to eat, and all were greatly exposed to adverse weather.
Frankl believed that all people must find their own, unique why—in other words, their purpose in life. He wrote that those who found some meaning or purpose were more likely to survive the concentration camps, and those who had lost their purpose were almost certainly doomed. Two important distinctions must be made between the search for meaning in life and related psychological processes. First, although Frankl wrote that the will to meaning drove each person to find the unique meaning of his or her own life, others distinguished between searching for meaning and having meaning.
A common assumption is that only people without meaning in life would search for it. Essentially, the assumption was that searching for and feeling the presence of meaning in life were opposite ends of the same continuum. Several lines of research, however, demonstrate that searching for meaning is different from having meaning. Psychological measures of how much people are searching for meaning and how much meaning people feel in their lives have very little overlap. Also, the assumption that searching for and having meaning are opposite versions of the same thing may be culturally bound.
That is to say, among European Americans who often think in terms of individuality and dichotomies , there is a small, inverse relation between the two the less you have, the more you search, and vice versa , whereas some evidence suggests that among people from cultures that are more traditionally collectivistic or holistic who often think in terms of relationships or harmony, e.
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