Emily Falk

Purpose, there's a lot of research that highlights how purpose can make us more open to constructive feedback like we're talking about here.

It can also make us more likely to engage in conversations.

behaviors that are good for our body like there's a reciprocal relationship between things like getting a good night's sleep or going for a walk or connecting with people that we love and a sense of purpose so when we do those things that are good for our bodies we can feel more purposeful later and then when we feel more purposeful

it makes it more likely that we'll do those things.

And I think that an important thing to highlight there is that sometimes I think we think of some people as being more purposeful, like Mother Teresa, super purposeful, right?

But in reality, most of us fluctuate on a day-to-day basis around some set point.

Like we have our average, but some days we feel more purposeful.

Some days we feel less purposeful.

And on those days where...

we feel more purposeful maybe because we reflected on the things that really matter to us or maybe we took the time to go for a walk around the block or to call our best friend on the phone, that that has all these other benefits as well.

So when we had people do a values affirmation exercise where they ranked different values that might be important to them, as you said, some people choose values that are these self-transcendent values that connect them to a bigger whole, to people or a world that's bigger than myself.

And when people tend to endorse these self-transcendent values more as composed of more self-focused values, that they show lower reactivity in brain regions that track threat.

So it seems like getting those kinds of health coaching messages when they have this other psychological resource of self-transcendent values to rely on, that that incoming information might be less threatening.

Yeah, so this is research that I really love.

The idea is that there are certain kinds of experiences that we have that can be relatively transformative experiences that often involve kind of letting go, again, of that bounded sense of self and seeing the way that we're connected to something much bigger than ourselves.

So something that connects us to other people, to the rest of humanity.

And so this can happen through meditation.

It can happen when people take psychedelic drugs.

It can happen through rituals where people come together and do things.

So like you mentioned Burning Man and my friend and fellow neuroscientist Molly Crockett has explored how these kinds of transformative experiences are characterized really by an expansion, an expanded sense of self.