Please note that this post contains affiliate links. For more information, see my disclosures here.
For many of us, our sense of fulfillment and overall satisfaction from life stems from meaning. We go about our days trying to find meaning in the madness, and purpose in the choices we make and the actions we take.
Living a meaningful life is what we all strive for every day. Whether it’s volunteering every weekend, traveling, investing in rewarding relationships, or even meditating every morning, we’re all trying to find ways in which we provide our lives with more meaning and purpose.
Well, living a meaningful life may be as simple as that, according to new research. A recent study found that people who regularly engage in routines actually experience a greater sense of meaning in their day-to-day lives than those who don’t.
In fact, setting and following daily routines was found to add more significance, purpose, and coherence to peoples’ lives. In essence, those in the study who had more structure in their lives expressed their lives as being more meaningful than those who had less structure.
Hm. Maybe I haven’t been giving morning routines enough credit. Maybe there is more meaning in the ritual.
I’ll admit that when I think of a meaningful life, I think of experiences that are on more of a grandiose level than, say, doing my weekly face mask. For example, traveling abroad is something that I see as adding more meaning to my life, simply because it’s an extraordinary experience.
Meaning is something that is actually far more accessible than this, though. These findings suggest that even the most mundane daily habits, like making yourself coffee every morning, reading at night, or exercising every day may actually engender even greater feelings of meaning than the extraordinary, often unattainable experiences.
Perhaps finding meaning is something we don’t necessarily have to ‘find.’ Maybe we’ve been searching for an answer that was, in fact, right there in front of us all along.
One thing’s for sure, I’m definitely going to be savoring my routines a lot more now, even if it is just drinking my morning coffee 🙂
Drop a line