There are a handful of junctures in life when a person’s sense of purpose is prone to twinkle and fade. In unemployment or professional stagnation; in financial or romantic straits, or after the death of a loved one; and, predictably, in retirement. To that point, the program Experience Corps seems to have stumbled into an elegant solution. For the past decade, the nonprofit has paired people ages 55 and older with students in kindergarten through third grade who need academic help. Across 19 U.S. cities, volunteers have taken up literacy coaching and proven that in their spare time they can significantly increase students’ test scores and morale. Which is great, of course. But the unexpected side effect of the programs was that the adults experienced significant health improvements, both mental and physical. The tutors’ rates of depression fell; and their physical mobility, stamina, and flexibility increased. They also showed improvements in executive functioning and memory.

One of the drivers of those health benefits, according to Eric Kim, a doctoral candidate examining the intersection of social connection and physical health at the University of Michigan, is that the tutors developed a renewed sense of purpose in their lives. In research published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Kim and colleagues found that people with greater senses of purpose in life were more likely to embrace preventive healthcare: things like mammograms, prostate exams, colonoscopies, and flu shots. In the study, people rated their own sense of purpose on a multidimensional questionnaire that included incisive prompts like, "I sometimes feel I've done all there is to do in my life" and "I enjoy making plans for the future and working to make them a reality." Even after the researchers accounted for socioeconomic factors that predict a person’s likelihood of getting preventive care, people with purpose in their lives were clearly more engaged in their own health.

The idea of cultivating purpose as a means of improving a patient’s health is not ingrained in U.S. medical practice, but it isn’t novel. Viktor Frankl, after surviving Nazi concentration camps, wrote in 1946’s Man's Search for Meaning that his fellow prisoners tended to lose their sense of purpose first, and then get sick, and then die. He proposed that people live longer when they have a greater will to live; that a person might actively cultivate purpose—carefully distinguished from pursuing happiness—as a tenet of physical health. Still, modern doctors are not trained (or reimbursed) to counsel patients on their purposes in life. But the idea, which might seem sappy or self-helpy—a vibe that rightly engenders dismissiveness because of its appropriation by unscientific profiteers—could be concretely beneficial. The U.S. healthcare system spends more than twice as much per patient as almost every other wealthy country, owing in part to a lack of emphasis on, and compliance with, preventive health services. A stitch in time, as they say, saves the exorbitant hospitalization and surgical costs of draining an infected laceration.

So some of the roughly $3.8 trillion in U.S. medical spending could be defrayed, it seems, with purposeful cultivation of community and meaning. Only around 4 percent of U.S. health expenditures go to prevention, and most adults are delinquent in their recommended health screening. Those statistics converge with past research that shows that purpose is associated with things like exercise and intentional relaxation. Researchers at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago found that greater purpose in life was associated with a reduced risk of Alzheimer’s disease. Kim’s own past research has found that a sense of purpose predicts fewer subsequent strokes and heart attacks.

"I know when I go to the doctor, they do depression screening,” Kim told me. “But just because a person doesn't have depression doesn't mean they have a high sense of purpose.”

Frankl, who was a psychotherapist and student of Freud in Vienna, did have an approach called logotherapy—a strategy to discover meaning that centered on the tenet that all life is meaningful, if not recognizably. But logotherapy often involved rigorous psychotherapy, often in groups, often undertaken for many years. As Victor Strecher, a professor of health behavior and health education at University of Michigan School of Public Health and co-author of today’s study, notes, that is just not practical for most people today. Randomized control trials have recently shown that purpose can be cultivated with months of group psychotherapy. A study earlier this year showed success in people with cancer. But commitment, access, and compliance are hurdles. So Strecher has taken up purpose cultivation as the thrust of his career in recent years. Or, in his words, "What would Victor Frankl do now?” What would be the postmodern approach to helping people develop greater purpose?

"I think we're in an increasingly nihilistic world,” Strecher said, where it’s not necessarily standard to aspire to “something beyond just watching the Kardashian sisters on television and seeing what they're doing." When we spoke, he cited Nietzsche offhandedly, in his warning that as God dies in our lives, as we leave our families—in other words, as we modernize—people have to start finding their own meaning and values. And Emile Durkheim, who wrote in 1897’s Suicide that as we no longer live in the same villages as our families, growing disconnected, we’d increasingly kill ourselves.