Wendie Trubow, MD, MBA, IFMCPPresident at Five Journeys, Functional Medicine & Wellness Provider, Best Selling Author, Passionate Champion for Health

How a Sense of Purpose Supports Brain Health

31 Oct 2025 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

1:05

A speaker explains how having a sense of purpose and belonging benefits brain and physiological health. They argue that purpose reduces harmful biological processes (e.g., inflammatory gene expression), parallels effects of substances like curcumin, and that purpose both motivates action and connects individuals to something larger, producing measurable health impacts.

Chapters

Why having a sense of purpose helps cognitive decline. There's been a lot of research around loneliness and the impact of loneliness on physiological health, on the chemistry, right? But if we flip that and we think about the power of belonging when we belong, we are actually turning off inflammatory genes at a rate that we can speak about turmeric or curcumin, right? There's things we can do in life that actually have a physiological impact. Impact and purpose is a huge one. But without the purpose, without the reason why we're doing the thing, without the thing that fuels us to move forward, it's all for naught. And so purpose at so many levels helps us connect with ourselves. It helps us to resonate internally. It drives us forward to make change. But it also often helps us to feel connected to something larger than ourselves, which has a physiological impact pact in and of itself.