/MentalHealth

When we talk about losing your purpose in life, that weird feeling of waking up and not really knowing why you're getting out of bed, your thoughts go straight to your head. We think about depression, apathy, existential crises, which makes all the sense in the world. But what we usually forget, or maybe don't even know, is that this lack of direction messes with the body's biology in a pretty aggressive way. The mind and the body aren't separated by a wall, after all. When you spend too much time feeling like your presence doesn't make that much of a difference, your organism sort of understands that the environment is hostile and starts acting on the defensive. The brain deals with this lack of perspective by activating a stress response that, deep down, is supposed to be temporary. It's that hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis that kicks into gear. In a normal dangerous situation, it shoots out hormones for you to run or fight and then everything goes back to normal. But when the problem is an existential void, there is nothing to run from. The result is a constant dripping of cortisol and adrenaline into your blood, day after day. This chronic stress destroys tissues, messes up your blood pressure, and drains the energy that your cells needed to function properly. There is some research from the University of California that shows something pretty impressive about how our genes respond to this. They found a pattern that basically dictates how the body defends itself. When a person has clear goals and feels useful to others, their genes activate a protection against viruses and keep inflammation low. Without that direction, the process reverses. The body starts producing more pro-inflammatory cytokines and lowers its immunity. This constant little inflammation, which stays hidden there for years, is the starting point for almost every complicated chronic illness we know, like diabetes or artery problems. It's like the body starts attacking itself because it sees no reason to preserve itself. The heart ends up being one of the things that suffers the most from this. People who follow groups of elderly individuals for decades notice that those who lose their sense of meaning in life are much more likely to have a heart attack or a stroke. It's not just a matter of sadness affecting the heart in some magical way, it's pure physics. The instability in your hormones and nervous system keeps damaging the inner wall of the blood vessels. Over time, it becomes much easier for fat plaques to build up there, hardening the arteries. Another place where the damage shows up is in the brain. Scientists at an Alzheimer's research center in the United States noticed something curious when analyzing the brains of people who had already died. Many of them had the physical signs of the disease, those typical Alzheimer's plaques scattered through the tissues, but in life they simply didn't show signs of dementia. What they had in common was a very strong sense of purpose. This daily motivation created a kind of cognitive reserve that protected the mind even with a damaged brain. On the other hand, when a person gives up on pursuing goals, the brain starts to atrophy faster, especially in the memory region. If you stop using the system, it shuts down. This ends up spilling over into general physical integrity and mobility. It's common to see people who lose their way in middle age start to weaken physically much faster than normal. They lose grip strength in their hands, start walking slower, and get frail. In part this happens because the lack of perspective drops dopamine levels, which besides giving pleasure is what moves us, literally, commanding motor coordination and muscles. Not to mention the basics of daily self-sabotage. If you don't care much about tomorrow, you sleep poorly, eat whatever processed junk food you can find to look for quick comfort, and ignore that doctor's appointment you should have gone to months ago. In the end, having a purpose has nothing to do with saving the planet or becoming a great leader. It can be something small, like taking care of a backyard, dedicating yourself to a woodworking project in the garage, or helping out a neighbor. The body needs this connection to something external to understand that it's worth it to keep functioning well. It's almost like a medicine that the organism manufactures itself, except we need to give it the right stimulus to release the dose.