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- Just knowing that we lack purpose makes us anxious. Purpose anxiety occurs when we feel stress and nerves about trying or struggling to find our purpose in life. Researcher Larissa Rainey explored purpose anxiety and found it can happen at two stages. One of them is while we work to discover our purpose, and the other while we work to achieve it.
www.betterup.com/blog/i-have-no-purpose
Apr 9, 2021 · The end of a chapter in life, or a bout of depression or anxiety can trigger one to feel a lack of purpose. The key to finding purpose is clearing away the obstacles that...
- How Creating a Sense of Purpose Can Impact Your Mental Health
Signs of purpose anxiety include the following: Constantly...
- How Creating a Sense of Purpose Can Impact Your Mental Health
Dec 7, 2023 · Lack of direction/purpose could contribute to anxiety/depression; experiencing depression/anxiety could contribute to less motivation and participation in things that used to give purpose; or they could compound each other.
- Overview
- The psychology of purpose
- What is purpose anxiety?
- 5 signs you might have purpose anxiety
- How to switch your purpose mindset
What purpose looks, feels, and sounds like is really up to me
I don’t know about you, but my social media feeds are inundated with professionals, entrepreneurs, and freelancers advocating for finding my purpose, claiming to have found theirs.
Research has shown a link between a strong sense of purpose and resilience. It’s also been shown to increase the chance of healthy aging.
This sounds great in theory, but I often find myself reflecting on what my purpose might be and coming up with, well, not very much.
Purpose as a concept has been somewhat tricky for psychologists to explore. The word itself covers such an expanse of human experience, it’s difficult to know where to begin.
In his book, “The Happiness Hypothesis,” positive psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt says when we seek to understand the meaning of life, we’re actually seeking answers to two distinct questions:
1.What is the purpose of life?
2.What is the purpose within life?
The benefits of pursuing these questions are vast.
Research has consistently linked purpose to heightened levels of emotional and mental well-being and overall life satisfaction. One study even found that having a sense of purpose in life led to better physical health, and as a result, longer life expectancy.
Although psychologists have acknowledged the distress that searching for your purpose might cause for some time, the term “purpose anxiety” is more recent.
Researcher Larissa Rainey writes in her paper exploring the topic in-depth that “Purpose anxiety can provisionally be defined as the negative emotions experienced in direct relation to the search for purpose.”
In other words, it’s the anxiety we feel when we don’t have a sense of purpose but are all too aware that it’s missing. Rainey goes on to write that purpose anxiety can be experienced at two different stages:
1.While struggling to actually uncover what your purpose might be
2.While attempting to enact or ‘live’ your purpose
Purpose anxiety can be experienced on a spectrum, ranging from mild to moderate to severe. It can encompass a range of negative emotions including stress, worry, frustration, fear, as well as anxiety. In her research on the concept, Rainey found a whopping 91 percent of participants surveyed reported experiencing purpose anxiety at some point in their life.
Constantly switching jobs or companies
This was a big one for me, especially in my 20s. I would job-hop seeking the “perfect” role. Essentially, I was looking to external cues through my job or company to help indicate I’d “found purpose.”
Feeling ‘not good enough’ or like a failure
With so many stories out there about others having found their purpose, it can be hard not to feel like a failure when I’m not on the same path. I’ve long been tied to notions that purpose looks like a particular job title. When I see old friends from university making professional gains and securing those senior job titles, I’ve learned to remind myself that no two journeys are the same, and the way one finds purpose is not always how another will.
Negative comparisons
Something I tend to indulge in a lot is making comparisons. Instead of reflecting inwards on what purpose means to me, I find myself comparing with others and feeling as though I come up short.
If striving for purpose is actually causing stress, you might be wondering why you should bother.
Rainey argues that the benefits of finding purpose hugely outweigh the experience of purpose anxiety. Once you acknowledge you have it, you can begin to proactively switch up your mindset and pursue your purpose in more positive ways:
- Donate your time, money, or talent.
- Explore different interests to find out what you love to do.
- Reflect on what type of injustices bother you the most.
- Meet new people.
But when the future is uncertain, we may struggle to define what exactly our purpose is. When unfruitful, this search for purpose can lead to existential distress, which the Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl called “noögenic neurosis” — also known as purpose anxiety.
Nov 1, 2023 · A study by the Harvard Graduate School of Education found that three in five young adults felt their lives lacked meaning and purpose. Young adults in the U.S. are reporting feelings of anxiety and depression twice as frequently as teenagers, according to a recent report from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
People also ask
Does lack of purpose make you anxious?
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What is purpose anxiety? Just knowing that we lack purpose makes us anxious. Purpose anxiety occurs when we feel stress and nerves about trying or struggling to find our purpose in life. Researcher Larissa Rainey explored purpose anxiety and found it can happen at two stages.
