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

The Power of Having a Reason to Live

14 Nov 2025 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

1:01

A short conversational YouTube segment (two speakers) exploring the psychological importance of having a lived, felt "reason to live" rather than merely an intellectual understanding. Speakers contrast cognitive/intellectual knowledge with embodied, kinesthetic conviction, argue that intellectual insight alone is insufficient motivation for behavior change, and emphasize reexamining what makes life meaningful amid external causes for despair or fear.

Chapters

You may know everything and you might be 100% right, but actually feeling it in your body and getting it as a kinesthetic and in the body effect versus in the brain is a completely different venture. It doesn't. It's not even close.
Yeah. And another way to say that is you've got to find a reason to live. Developing an intellectual understanding of why you do the things you do is not enough of a. That's not a reason to live. It's like an. It's an academic experience. So people have to, you know, do. Do I care about my kids enough to change my diet, to see my kid graduate from college, for example? Is that the meaning? Is that the reason to live? And I think that's also important in integration. And something that is overlooked is this issue around reexamining what it makes our lives meaningful. Now, there's plenty of reasons in our external world to feel despair or fear. Right. It's a scary world to be in. So I think we have to dig deeper, all of us.