Happy Thanksgiving weekend to all!
Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday of the year – the moment we pause from frantic holiday gift buying or work to ponder what we’re grateful for and who we’re connected with.
And of the many gifts I’ve been granted in my life, my greatest gratitude is reserved for my immediate family – my husband and children – my work colleagues and those I serve, which is all of you.
You allow me to connect with you every week – often few times a week – you read my words in my books, you open communications regularly from me, you put your trust in me when you join my courses.
And by doing all of this, you give meaning and purpose to my life. I cannot tell you how grateful I am to be part of your life.
Viktor Frankl, an Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, proposed that humankind’s most fundamental urge is a search for meaning. Why exactly are we here? And what makes for a life well lived?
Perhaps the most compelling answer to that question once came from psychologists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, North Carolina, who wanted to examine the difference in likely future health between people who live a fulfilling life of pleasure and happiness –what we’d normally define as the good life – compared to those who live a life of purpose or meaning.
The researchers gathered together a group of 160 healthy volunteers, after separating them into two groups.
The first were people who were pleasure-seekers, who lived for the self and their own happiness and satisfaction above all.
The others were those who felt that life had a sense of direction and meaning, they’d had experiences that had challenged them to become better people, and as a result, they felt they had something to contribute to society.
Although the members of the two groups had many emotional similarities, and all claimed to be highly content and not depressed, their gene expression profile couldn’t have been more different.
Among the pleasure seekers, the psychologists were amazed to discover high levels of inflammation, considered a marker for degenerative illnesses, and lower levels of gene expression involved in antibody synthesis, the body’s response to outside attack.
If you hadn’t known their histories, you would have concluded that these were the gene profiles of people exposed to a great deal of adversity, or in the midst of difficult life crises: a low socioeconomic status, social isolation, diagnosis with a life-threatening disease, a recent bereavement.
These people were all perfect candidates for a heart attack, Alzheimer’s disease, even cancer. In a few years, they would be dropping like flies.
Those whose lives were not as affluent or stress-free but were purposeful and filled with meaning, on the other hand, had low inflammatory markers and stress-related gene expression down-regulated, both indicative of rude good health.
If you had to choose one path over the other, the researchers concluded, choosing a life of meaning and service over one just chasing pleasure was undeniably better for your health.
Most of us are taught that the single most important impulse we have is to survive at all costs, or to be ‘happy,’ but our need to connect with others and contribute something to the world is perhaps the one element that gives our life the greatest meaning.
In fact, deep connection and belonging is the quality perhaps most essential to human nature.
After Robert Putnam of Harvard University wrote his ground-breaking book Bowling Alone, which woke Americans up to the fraying of the social fabric across the US, researchers at the John F. Kennedy School at Harvard decided to explore exactly what makes for what they refer to as ‘social capital’ – happiness, close-knit communities and satisfied residents – by carrying out a survey among 30,000 people in communities across America.
What they found was revelatory. Money just didn’t do it for people. Emotional happiness had very little to do with your bank balance once you achieved an annual income above $75,000 (about £50,000). That was the benchmark for happiness. People below that income were miserable because they were struggling just to pay the bills, but once you achieved that level of income, making more money than that just didn’t equate to any greater happiness.
But the one factor that made for the greatest sense of happiness and satisfaction was lending a helping hand. In fact those willing to give of their time or money were 42 per cent more likely to be happy than those who didn’t.
The key to a long and healthy life is living a life that concerns itself with a meaning beyond satisfying the needs of number 1.
Getting what you want in your own life starts with the readiness to give.
So I am grateful for you – for giving structure and meaning to my life, for enabling me to serve you and to watch you sprout wings and fly.
May you count your blessings this weekend, as I have counted mine and find the greatest joy in connection and service.
