Purpose Isn't Just a Mindset — It's Cellular

You've heard "find your purpose" so many times it's started to feel like wallpaper. Something for the journal prompt, the vision board, the retreat you can't afford to take right now. Somewhere along the way, purpose got filed under nice-to-have — a mindset thing, not a body thing.

I want to gently challenge that filing system. Because the more I read, the more it looks like purpose isn't just shaping how you feel about your life. It may be shaping how your cells produce and use energy in the first place.

The Conversation That Changed How I Think About This

I've been sitting with an episode of The Diary Of A CEO featuring Dr Martin Picard, a mitochondrial psychobiologist and professor at Columbia University, where he directs the Mitochondrial Psychobiology Group. His research sits at the intersection of psychosocial experience and cellular biology — specifically, how things like stress, meaning, and connection change the mitochondria inside your cells.

Two chapters of that conversation stopped me: "Why Meaningful Goals Become Magnets for Your Energy," and "Does Having a Purpose Improve Mitochondrial Function?" His research, as framed in that conversation, suggests that people with a strong, felt sense of purpose show markers of more efficient mitochondrial function — particularly in the brain. Not just better mood. Not just more motivation. More efficient energy production, at a cellular level.

The broader idea — that purpose is doing measurable, physiological work — is not new, and it's not fringe. It's been building in the research literature for over a decade.

What We Already Knew, Before Mitochondria Entered the Picture

Long before anyone was looking at mitochondria specifically, researchers were finding that a sense of purpose predicts things that have nothing to do with feeling good in the moment.

Patrick Hill and Nicholas Turiano followed adults across the Midlife in the United States study and found that people with a stronger sense of purpose lived longer over the following fourteen years — a relationship that held even after controlling for other measures of psychological wellbeing, and regardless of age or retirement status (Hill & Turiano, 2014).

Patricia Boyle and colleagues, in a clinicopathologic study out of Rush University, found something even more striking: among people who went on to have brain autopsies, those who had reported a greater sense of purpose in life showed better cognitive function even when their brains showed the same degree of Alzheimer's pathology — plaques and tangles — as those with less purpose. Purpose appeared to buffer the relationship between the disease process in the brain and the person's actual cognitive experience of it (Boyle et al., 2012).

And in Japan, the decades-long Ohsaki cohort study of over 43,000 adults found that people who did not report a sense of ikigai — roughly, "a life worth living" — had a significantly higher risk of all-cause mortality over the following years, largely driven by cardiovascular disease (Sone et al., 2008).

| Purpose isn't a soft outcome sitting downstream of health. In study after study, it behaves like an input.

Why This Isn't a Manifestation Claim

I want to be careful with this territory, because "purpose heals you" can tip very quickly into magical thinking, and that's not what I'm pointing at. Nobody is saying you can think your way out of illness, or that lacking purpose is your fault if you're unwell.

What the research — and Picard's framing of it — actually suggests is more specific and more useful: purpose appears to change how your body allocates a finite resource. Energy. The same way chronic stress diverts energy toward short-term survival and away from repair, a felt sense of meaning may do the opposite — signalling to the system that this effort is worth investing in, worth building capacity around, worth sustaining.

That's not mysticism. That's resource allocation.

The Clients Who Are Depleted Aren't Always the Busiest Ones

Here's what I notice constantly in clinic: the most exhausted people are rarely the ones doing the most. They're the ones spending their finite energy on things that don't actually mean anything to them — the meetings that exist to justify other meetings, the roles taken on out of guilt rather than genuine alignment, the version of a life that looks right from the outside but doesn't feel like theirs from the inside.

And the clients who feel most alive, most resourced, are rarely doing less. They're just spending their energy on things that are congruent with what actually matters to them. The output looks similar from the outside. The internal cost is completely different.

I've written before about what "holding space" really means — a lot of that piece is about the difference between effort that depletes and effort that restores, which is really the same conversation from a different angle.

Purpose Is Not the Same as Passion

I think part of why "find your purpose" has become such an empty phrase is that we've confused it with passion — a feeling you're supposed to locate, fully formed, like a missing puzzle piece. That's a lot of pressure, and it's rarely how purpose actually shows up.

In practice, purpose tends to look more like direction than destination. It's less "the one true calling" and more "the things that, when I do them, I don't feel like I'm fighting myself." It can be as modest as raising your children with intention, or as public as building a business. The scale doesn't seem to matter as much as the congruence.

What This Means for the Way You Structure Your Life

If purpose is doing real physiological work — shaping how efficiently your body produces and allocates energy — then the things that feel meaningful to you aren't indulgent extras to fit in once the "real" work is done. They may be part of the infrastructure your nervous system uses to decide what's worth investing in.

Some ways I see this play out with clients:

— treating the meaningful project as non-negotiable, not the thing that gets cut first when the week gets busy — noticing which of your current commitments feel congruent, and which feel like performance — giving yourself permission to let purpose be modest and specific, rather than waiting for something grand enough to count — understanding that chasing purpose in a dysregulated nervous system rarely works — stabilisation and meaning tend to build together, not in sequence

Ground first. Purpose follows. Not because purpose isn't important — but because a nervous system in survival mode struggles to metabolise meaning the same way it struggles to metabolise anything else that isn't an immediate threat.

References - AI helped me research this. 

Hill, P.L., & Turiano, N.A. (2014). Purpose in Life as a Predictor of Mortality Across Adulthood. Psychological Science, 25(7), 1482–1486.

Boyle, P.A., Buchman, A.S., Barnes, L.L., & Bennett, D.A. (2012). Effect of Purpose in Life on the Relation Between Alzheimer Disease Pathologic Changes on Cognitive Function in Advanced Age. Archives of General Psychiatry, 69(5), 499–505.

Sone, T., Nakaya, N., Ohmori, K., et al. (2008). Sense of Life Worth Living (Ikigai) and Mortality in Japan: Ohsaki Study. Psychosomatic Medicine, 70(6), 709–715.

Bartlett, S. (Host). (2026, July 2). The Mitochondria Doctor: This Reverses Gray Hair, Makes You Feel Young Again & Fixes Disease! [Audio podcast episode]. In The Diary Of A CEO.