Dr. Robert Butler, the first director of the National Institute on Aging, performed a study that looked at having a sense of purpose and life expectancy. He found that people who have a clear sense of purpose, a reason to get up in the morning, lived up to seven years longer than those who didn’t have a clear purpose. In another study of 7,000 adults, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, those who had the lowest life purpose scores were twice as likely to die as those with the highest scores.
