What goes on in our brains when we exercise our purpose? Innovation and neuroscience expert Tanja Yardley dives into the benefits of purpose and how we can strengthen our purpose muscles.
Episode Transcript
Being purposeful in our innovation work has a tremendous amount of benefits. It makes us happy, releasing oxytocin which improves our empathy and social bonding. It also releases dopamine which helps with our motivation and movement toward action. Serotonin is also released, which regulates our mood. Purpose also helps us perform, in addition to making us happy. Ironically, one of the things that they discovered when they were doing studies on people when they were in a purposeful state of mind, is that they also released endorphins which boosted their physical performance and actually reduced pain. Purpose also activates resiliency and protects your brain, and makes us more biologically resilient. In a ground-breaking study, neuropsychologist Dr. Patricia Boyle and her colleagues at Rush University followed over 900 older people who were at risk for dementia. Participants who identified a purpose in life outside of themselves were only half as likely to develop Alzheimer’s. Though they don’t know how yet, follow-up studies suggest having a purpose affects cognitive reserve or the biological strength and resilience of the brain cells to injury and degradation. Other studies showed a 72% lower risk of stroke and a 44% lower rate of cardiovascular disease, so it’s really important that we strengthen our purpose muscles.
There are several ways that we can do that. One is to have an orientation towards the positive and practice self-talk which is grounded in reality. This allows us to bounce back and also reduces our natural negativity bias. The key thing is that whatever affirmation you’re saying to yourself has to have a kernel of truth, otherwise we will learn not to trust ourselves and it actually gets in our way. A second key practice is an orientation towards gratitude. There’s a lot of research that shows a daily gratitude practice really helps to stimulate creative flow, affirms our purpose, and restores our sense of connection. The third feature is an orientation toward presence. That is usually accomplished through some form of daily mindfulness practice. And the last and most important piece is an orientation towards service and the ability to ask yourself at any given moment, what work needs to be done right here and now and what problems can I solve?
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