By Dharma Lab
21 min read
Source: dharmalabco.substack.com
they’re learning awareness, connection, insight, and purpose. One thing we’ve found is that purpose in particular is enormously powerful. The teachers reported that they were especially impacted by the purpose dimension.

When we invited them to do simple, active practices seamlessly integrated into their everyday life — for example, reflecting on their purpose in becoming a teacher while commuting to work — it made a real difference. We’ve done this work during COVID and immediately post-COVID. Public school teachers in the United States are a very highly stressed group, and the symptoms of anxiety and depression are off the scale.

Approximately 50% of public school teachers in America today present with clinically significant symptoms of anxiety and/or depression.

Richie: Reflecting on their purpose, they reported, was like an elixir for their soul. It flipped their mindset. They may still have been anxious — it’s not that it got rid of the anxiety — but it put the anxiety in its place. They were reminded of their purpose, of dedicating their lives to really helping children in a meaningful way. They may still have felt anxious, but it was no longer the central feature of their experience.

Cort: The one phrase we’ve heard probably more than any other is some variant of this reminded me of why I became a teacher in the first place. We forget that when life gets stressful and we’re burnt out. But when you have an abiding sense of purpose, you can get through those difficult things.

In terms of a skill, especially when I’m going into a situation I know will be hard, one thing I’ve found helpful is to come back to some value or deeper motivation. Something nourishing that at first is not linked to that experience — it might seem very distant from it. For both of us, altruism and being of service is a huge personal value and a North Star. I’ll think of the situation in light of that. I’ll say to myself: this is not fun, nobody would want to be experiencing this — but may this somehow be of benefit to others. Whatever comes of this, may it equip me to do some good in the world and to help others.

If I look at anxiety specifically: so many times when I give a public talk or lead a retreat, people come up to me afterward and say, I’ve struggled with anxiety, and it meant so much to me to hear that you struggled with it too. I see you sitting there and you don’t look nervous, and it was a shock to hear that you had a phobia of public speaking. It’s meaningful to people. Our struggles actually are sources of empathy and connection with others. They give us the fuel to be of benefit. The skill is simply to make the link — how can this be fuel for learning and growth? How can this be an opportunity to come back to integrity, or to kindness? It’s a simple thing, it doesn’t take long, but it totally shifts the mindset around the experience. Suddenly I’m not resisting or dreading. It’s a training ground.

Our struggles are sources of empathy and connection with others. They give us the fuel to be of benefit.

Richie: Those are great examples. In terms of scientific research, one thing we’ve found is that people with a stronger sense of purpose recover much more quickly following a stressor. One of the issues with anxiety — and the reason it’s challenging — is that it tends to persist and infiltrate periods when it’s no longer useful. It perseverates. Having a strong sense of purpose is associated with a much more rapid recovery back down to baseline. We’ve now seen that across several different studies with different populations. It’s a scientific validation of the beneficial effect of cultivating purpose on physiological responses.

Cort: And what’s really cool about this is that it’s not just how you feel. Your physiology is changing. Your work is showing brain function changes. There’s other work on things like recovery after surgery — shocking to me when I first saw it — showing how quickly somebody recovers can be predicted in part by how strong a sense of purpose they have. Not a sense of purpose about the recovery — just their sense of purpose generally in life. That’s predictive of better surgical outcomes and of how your brain responds to stressful stimuli. It really gets under the skin.

Closing

Cort: So those are four strategies, and ideally we practice all four. You don’t need to learn them all at once, but they’re all tools in the toolbox, and they’re especially powerful if you practice them together. Awareness, connection, insight, and purpose — four different strategies we can employ. If you found this helpful or interesting, our new book Born to Flourish gets into a lot of detail about this. Richie, take us out.

Richie: Let me just leave with the thought that these strategies all work synergistically together. They support one another and can be practiced together in the same experience. When Cort and I were reflecting on how to introduce each of these four dimensions in Dharma Lab, rather than having one episode on awareness and another on connection and so forth, we thought it would be more helpful and practical to introduce them in the context of ordinary issues like anxiety that we all experience, and show how all four are relevant. We hope you can appreciate that flourishing really is multidimensional. When we have these skills at our fingertips, we can deploy them — we might use more of one in certain contexts and another in others, but we can also bring multiple skills to bear in any particular context. This gives us a rich set of skills to enhance our flourishing. We really hope it’s been practically useful as well as intellectually illuminating, and you can read more in Born to Flourish.

Cort: Thank you so much, Richie, and thank you everyone for tuning in for another episode of Dharma Lab. Hopefully you found something interesting and helpful, and we look forward to seeing you at another episode soon. Take care.

Inspired? Share: