We have more power to change our physiology than we realise.
The way our psychology can filter down to our biology, changing our health outcomes for better or worse, is an ongoing source of fascination for researchers.
![Purpose: can it be an antidote to loneliness?](/web/20161210053139im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/t/6/l/7/r/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gt6krt.png/1481164735198.jpg)
Research has typically focused on happiness for providing positive health benefits while, at the other end of the spectrum, the negative effects of loneliness or grief on our health have been equally well-documented.
But, these are not the emotions that have the greatest impact.
![Contributing to the world around us can change our biology.](/web/20161210053139im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/t/6/l/7/h/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gt6krt.png/1481164735198.jpg)
Rather, it is the surprising power of purpose, more potent than happiness, and an antidote to stress and loneliness that has pricked up the ears of researchers.
In a talk at the International Congress of Behavioural Medicine in Melbourne on Thursday, Professor Steve Cole will discuss the latest research about how a sense of meaning and purpose trumps both happiness and loneliness in terms of the effect on our gene expression.
"For years we've often thought about what's happening when adverse life circumstances hit us and how that makes its way into our biology to change our health outcomes," explains Cole, of University of California's medical school, whose research focus is how social and environmental factors influence the activity of the human genome.
"That's how we got started in this genomic research. At some point the question arises – what can we do about that?"
While hitting animals in the lab with drugs could dull the effects, that hardly offered the answer.
"Is that really the only prospect we have for intervening in these things," Cole asks. "To drug everybody and put beta blockers in the water?"
So, for 10 years, Cole and his team worked with behavioural and social researchers to try to understand how we can live our lives "in a way that favourably and meaningfully impacts these kinds of molecular processes".
"That's the most exciting part of this research – that we're beginning to have answers," Cole says. "They're provisional, early stage answers but we're beginning to have leads about what actually works."
When they began to see a "very similar kind of biological fingerprint" or "threat signature" – from various kinds of adversity including bereavement, poverty and PTSD – they initially, intuitively, looked to happiness as a potential remedy to "threat and unhappiness making its way into the body".
Happiness, however, didn't offer the health benefit or physiological antidote to stress and sorrow that they were expecting.
"It wasn't awesome," Cole says. "These hysterically euphoric people didn't seem to be as much better as we might expect."
Accidentally, they made a more interesting discovery.
"Pursuing some kind of really significant project in your life – pursuing some kind of goal outside your immediate sense of self-gratification ... turned out to be associated with favourable gene expression profiles, reduced expression of that threat signature that's characterised by inflammation and poor antiviral responses," Cole explains.
After comparing their findings with numerous other studies they found a "reasonably consistent" pattern emerging among those who had a sense of purpose in their lives, whether it was caring for their family, engagement in work or community, the environment or even politics.
"There are a wide variety of ways to provide a sense of purpose or meaning in your life," Cole says. "So far they all look like they're similarly good ways to live at least in the sense of being associated with these favourable gene profiles.
"So what we can say is that merely being happy alone isn't enough, but being happy because you're pursuing something noble, something purposeful, something helpful to humanity, to people, to culture, to the progress of civilisation, that seems to be the core of a well led life."
Although, for some years researchers have appreciated that meaning is a better kind of happiness, leading to a longer, healthier life, the effect on our genes was lesser known as was its ability to counter loneliness.
Cole and his colleagues wanted to understand whether the hard times in our lives overshadowed the good – at least on a molecular level.
"If you've got a person who's got good stuff going on – they're leading a really purposeful life – and bad stuff going on – they feel lonely and disconnected from the rest of humanity – which one wins? I think a lot of us would have expected the negative side to win," Cole says.
"But what we found was that if people had lonely, challenging life circumstances, as long as they had some significant sense of meaning and purpose in what they were doing, they actually looked pretty good. The good stuff seems if anything to be more powerful."
What that means, Cole suggests, is that instead of attempting to fix feelings like loneliness or grief or stress, "focusing people on purpose and meaning can help people move through that".
Significantly, this approach is more powerful than simply trying to thrust someone who feels lonely, for instance, into a social setting.
"In fact, that's often the worst thing you can do," Cole says. "One of the things we learned about loneliness was all of us are lonely temporarily as a result of life circumstances – you move to a new city or the loss of a significant relationship, that kind of loneliness comes and goes but there's another version of loneliness where you're just lonely all the time – year after year after year you feel like you just don't fit in with the rest of the world you're not that close to people
"That's the kind of loneliness that matters for your biology – a few months of loneliness, it turns out our systems are pretty hardy and resilient to transient adversity. It's when loneliness becomes a lifestyle – a way of being that you start to see the most toxic effects in the biology and the most risk at the level of the epidemiology of disease and lifespan."
Research into those with chronic loneliness has found that they often come to view humanity as untrustworthy, "that people will take advantage of you where they can or, at very least, they won't be there when you need them", Cole explains.
"So you take a person who has developed a theory that basically other people cannot be trusted and you put them in [a social setting], they're just all the more stressed out.
What does work?
"Meaning and purpose-related psychology, starts to trump and supersede this kind of suspicious, cynical, hostile world-view," Cole says. "It's a note of optimism – so long as you can get people focused, not on trying to protect themselves, but on trying to make a better world you can maybe help them move through these experiences of social trauma and social punishment … it's all about your symbolic story – are you contributing to the world?"
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