This article first appeared on the blog of Intentional Insights, a nonprofit organization that empowers people to refine and reach their goals by providing research-based content to help improve thinking, feeling, and behavior patterns.
A free self-paced online course to help you discover your own sense of life purpose from a science-based perspective.
Have you ever felt like you go through the motions every day but it all seems meaningless? Did you know that you can use science to help you find a sense of life purpose? Wait, but science can't answer life's big questions - that's the job of religion and traditional culture, right? Well, a wave of recent research in psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and other disciplines has explored how we find meaning and purpose in life!
I wish I knew that when I was growing up. I struggled with gaining a sense of life meaning and purpose throughout my teenage years and young adulthood. I remember experiencing the sense of meaninglessness as an emptiness deep in the pit of my stomach. This sense of life purpose is not a trivial matter. Recent studies show that people who feel that their life has meaning experience a substantially higher sense of wellbeing and even physical health.
To help you gain a richer sense of life meaning and purpose, we at Intentional Insights developed a free online course, which combines an engaging narrative style, academic research, and stories from people's everyday lives with exercises to help you discover your own sense of life purpose and meaning from a science-based perspective.
By the completion of this course, students should be able to:
- Understand science-based strategies for finding purpose and meaning in life
- Customize these tools to their personal search for a deeper sense of life purpose
- Gain the knowledge and ability to refine and revise their sense of purpose and meaning throughout their lives
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Bio: Dr. Gleb Tsipursky runs a nonprofit that helps people reach their goals using science, Intentional Insights, authored Find Your Purpose Using Science, and is a tenure-track professor at Ohio State. Get in touch with him at gleb@intentionalinsights.org.