7.1 What is meaning and how can it help you and your family?

Having a sense of meaning and purpose in your life is considered to be a fundamental human need that can enhance wellbeing by bringing a multitude of positive mental and physical benefits.

For many people, especially as you enter adulthood, modern life can be a distraction from your deep-felt values and passions. It can be hard to remember what your purpose in life is when you are too busy trying to cope with getting through each day.

Why having meaning and purpose in life is so important

During times of adversity, having a sense of meaning and purpose about your life has been shown to play an important role in coping with stress and trauma.

Research carried out during the pandemic found that meaning in life buffered against COVID-19-specific stress (Trzebiński et al., 2020), and general levels of boredom, depression, anxiety and stress (Chao et al., 2020).

Research has also shown that as well as having a protecting effect during challenging times, meaning also offers individuals a way to help them to discover what this is and grow during a time of crisis. This was illustrated by a COVID-19 study showing that despite spikes in acute stress, depression and anxiety among front-line healthcare workers, an astonishing 61% of them said they had found increased meaning and purpose in life (Shechter et al., 2020).

In this final unit, you will have the chance to pause and consider meaning and what values that you want to live your life by. As parents, by contemplating these questions, you can also help to guide your children to understand which of their strengths, dreams and passions can be nurtured to help them to find their own meaning in life.

In this video, Michelle discusses why having meaning and purpose in life is so important for you and the wellbeing of your family.

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MICHELLE:
At the start of this course, in unit 1, I talked about how, as a parent, what most of us want for our children is for them to be happy and healthy -- in brief, to have positive wellbeing. But what does wellbeing actually mean from the viewpoint of positive psychology?
Current research on wellbeing has come from two different traditions -- first, from the hedonic approach to wellbeing, which focuses on pleasure and positive affect. This is the type of feeling good that we associate with feeling happy.
Second, from the eudaimonic approach. And this regards wellbeing as a concept, including a sense of purpose in life and self-realisation, a type of wellbeing that talks about functioning well.
One of the most well-known theories of wellbeing to come from positive psychology is Seligman's theory of subjective wellbeing or the PERMA model. According to this theory, which combines both the hedonic and eudaimonic approaches, there are five core elements to psychological wellbeing. And these together make up the acronym PERMA.
These include P, Positive emotion, E, Engagement, R, Relationships, M, Meaning, and A, Accomplishment. And in this last unit, the focus will be on meaning and purpose, which, as described in PERMA, has a central role in human functioning.
A sense of wellbeing has been described as the sum of our understandings and interpretations of our experiences. And this is what gives us direction in life. The search for meaning in life is a search for truth and sense. And judging a life as meaningful means that we, as individuals, have experienced a life that has a function or a goal that needs to be accomplished.
A sense of meaning may not only make an individual happier but can also help them cope with suffering. And in research that's been carried out, looking at what makes life meaningful, it's been identified that this is the life where you use your higher strengths or signature strengths in the service of something larger than you are, i.e., for the greater good of others.
The meaningful life is also the type of life where fulfilling and lasting wellbeing can be achieved and where the pursuit of pleasure and positive emotion is just the cherry on the top. As you will hear in this unit, meaning and purpose in life is really important to our health and wellbeing. You will also hear about why this is and the benefits that meaning and purpose can bring, not only to individuals but also to families, and particularly, during the type of challenge that we've experienced like the pandemic.
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Meaning and purpose

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A graphic detailing several quotes. He who has a why to live can bear almost any how. Nietzsche. Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose. Viktor Frankl. Remember that wherever your heart is, there you will find your treasure. Paulo Coelho. The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for. Fyodor Dostoyevsky. When you were born, you cried and the world rejoiced; live your life so that when you die, the world cries and you rejoice. Indian Proverb. There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you. Maya Angelou. Good luck is another name for tenacity of purpose. Ralph Waldo Emerson.

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The last of the six themes

7.2 The benefits for people who report higher levels of meaning