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It's easy to buy in to the idea that living a meaningful life is the golden ticket to well-being. If we could just find the career path or relationship that aligned perfectly with our values, all would be well with the world—or it would be for us, at least. In fact, research has shown that people who felt a sense of purpose in life were found to have healthier immune systems, lower depression levels, and were more resilient to stress.But according to a recent study conducted by researchers at Western Illinois University, living a meaningful life may come with some side-effects that we don’t typically consider markers of well-being. In addition to a range of potential benefits, the findings suggest that having work and relationships that feel meaningful may also make us more prone to anxiety.The results, which were published earlier this year in the journal Personality and Individual Differences shed light on why even when living the theoretical life of our dreams, we somehow always seem to wind up more anxious, worried, and stressed. While achieving or having something that we perceive as meaningful does come with a host of benefits, it also creates a fear of loss that appears to come with the territory.For the study, researchers asked 383 college students to respond to survey questions rating how meaningful they felt their education and relationships were. Their responses confirmed that meaningful endeavors were connected to more positive feelings, but they were also tied to higher rates of anxiety. The data also suggested that the increase in worry was specifically connected to the fear of failure or loss that was associated with pursuing the things that felt meaningful.“Humans are stuck in a bit of a paradox,” says Susan Orsillo, a professor of psychology at Suffolk University who has authored more than one hundred journal articles in the field of anxiety or anxiety-spectrum disorders. “We are hardwired to escape and avoid pain, but living a meaningful life essentially requires us to be willing to experience the full range of emotions—which absolutely includes sadness, fear, embarrassment, and emotional pain.”Unfortunately, most of us don’t live in cultures that encourage us to embrace and accept the so-called “negative” emotions. As a result, we enter our adult lives without the coping skills needed to manage these less desirable aspects of being human in a healthy way. And so we do what anyone else without the tools to experience and process pain and existential emotions would do: We come up with elaborate tactics for avoiding them.But if living a meaningful life necessarily requires us to feel anxiety, fear, and a host of other things we don’t want (or don’t know how) to feel, how do we move forward?
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“If we see fear and other emotions as part of being human, we can experience them as just an ebb and flow of our life, and move on. But when we try to avoid those emotions at all costs that’s when we can get really stuck,” Orsillo says.She adds that it may not actually be the emotions themselves that cause us to feel this way, but the meanings we assign to them. Non-judgment—or looking at emotions as neither good nor bad—can be an effective way to manage challenging feelings that come up as we attempt to make moves toward what matters.“Ironically, it’s when we judge ourselves for having emotions and struggle to suppress them that they actually grow in intensity and get in our way. Allowing them to be and understanding why they show up can make them less frightening,” says Orsillo, who has also spent the past 15 years developing and studying acceptance-based behavioral therapy approaches for anxiety.But if we can’t resist the urge to evaluate our feelings, we might consider that anxiety is not necessarily a bad thing, and there are ways to leverage it in the service of the things we find meaningful. “When people have some anxiety about what they’re doing, it can actually increase their attentiveness to detail and readiness, which can lead them to be more prepared for their endeavors,” says Margaret Wehrenberg, a clinical psychologist who specializes in what she calls “optimizing anxiety for achievement.”It turns out that while living a meaningful life is important for many reasons, it’s not the key to happiness. And though research has shown real connections between the two, living a life of purpose doesn’t promise us psychological well-being.It may even be that the more meaningful jobs, relationships, and creative projects we have, the more we open ourselves up to loss and failure, and the more prone to worry and fear we become. Ultimately, we may need to make a choice between the pursuit of an anxiety-free life, or a life that feels meaningful. We probably can’t have both.Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of Tonic delivered to your inbox weekly.
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“If we see fear and other emotions as part of being human, we can experience them as just an ebb and flow of our life, and move on. But when we try to avoid those emotions at all costs that’s when we can get really stuck,” Orsillo says.She adds that it may not actually be the emotions themselves that cause us to feel this way, but the meanings we assign to them. Non-judgment—or looking at emotions as neither good nor bad—can be an effective way to manage challenging feelings that come up as we attempt to make moves toward what matters.“Ironically, it’s when we judge ourselves for having emotions and struggle to suppress them that they actually grow in intensity and get in our way. Allowing them to be and understanding why they show up can make them less frightening,” says Orsillo, who has also spent the past 15 years developing and studying acceptance-based behavioral therapy approaches for anxiety.But if we can’t resist the urge to evaluate our feelings, we might consider that anxiety is not necessarily a bad thing, and there are ways to leverage it in the service of the things we find meaningful. “When people have some anxiety about what they’re doing, it can actually increase their attentiveness to detail and readiness, which can lead them to be more prepared for their endeavors,” says Margaret Wehrenberg, a clinical psychologist who specializes in what she calls “optimizing anxiety for achievement.”It turns out that while living a meaningful life is important for many reasons, it’s not the key to happiness. And though research has shown real connections between the two, living a life of purpose doesn’t promise us psychological well-being.It may even be that the more meaningful jobs, relationships, and creative projects we have, the more we open ourselves up to loss and failure, and the more prone to worry and fear we become. Ultimately, we may need to make a choice between the pursuit of an anxiety-free life, or a life that feels meaningful. We probably can’t have both.Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of Tonic delivered to your inbox weekly.
