sense of purpose

Data from the long-running Hawaii Longitudinal Study of Personality and Health, including new surveys of a diverse group of 749 people with an average age of 60, has found that people who have a sense of purpose in their life tend to make healthier lifestyle choices and report feeling better about their own health status.

These associations held even when controlling for the Big Five personality traits, indicating that the health benefits associated with sense of purpose cannot be fully attributable to broad personality traits. They suggest that having a purpose in life can be viewed as a multifaceted construct that influences both self-regulatory capacity and specific behaviors, such as physical activity, sleep quality, diet, and self-care.

http://www.futurity.org/sense-of-purpose-health-1642882/

A meta-analysis of 10 prospective studies involving a total of 136,265 older adults (average age 67) has found that having a high sense of purpose in life was significantly associated with lower mortality and cardiovascular events.

Most of the studies came from the United States or Japan. The US studies evaluated a sense of purpose or meaning in life, or "usefulness to others." The Japanese studies assessed the concept of ikigai, translated as "a life worth living."

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-12/wkh-il120315.php

Cohen, R., Bavishi, C., & Rozanski, A. (2016). Purpose in Life and Its Relationship to All-Cause Mortality and Cardiovascular Events: A Meta-Analysis. Psychosomatic Medicine, 78(2), 122–133. http://doi.org/10.1097/PSY.0000000000000274