How to Find Meaning and Purpose That Sustains You Through Difficult Times

There are periods in life — sometimes brief, sometimes extended — when the work feels hollow, the effort feels pointless, and you’re going through the motions without any real sense of why any of it matters. This is not depression (though it can accompany depression) and it is not laziness. It is often a meaning deficit — the experience of living and working without a sufficiently clear connection to what genuinely matters to you. Here’s how to find meaning and purpose that sustains you through difficult times — not as a philosophical luxury, but as a practical psychological necessity.

Why Meaning Matters More Than Happiness

Viktor Frankl, writing from his experience as a psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, argued that the fundamental human drive is not the pursuit of pleasure (as Freud proposed) or power (as Adler proposed) but the will to meaning — the need to find significance and purpose in existence. His book Man’s Search for Meaning, written from his experience in the Nazi concentration camps, documents how those who maintained a sense of meaning — a reason to survive — were significantly more likely to endure psychologically than those who had abandoned it.

Subsequent research has confirmed that meaning and purpose are distinct from happiness and more reliably linked to long-term wellbeing. People with a strong sense of purpose live longer (studies show up to 15% lower mortality risk), recover faster from difficulty, have better immune function, sleep better, and maintain higher psychological wellbeing under adverse circumstances — not because their circumstances are better, but because meaning provides the psychological sustenance that bare happiness cannot. Happiness responds to circumstances. Meaning transcends them.

Step 1 — Clarify What Genuinely Matters to You (Not What Should)

The most common obstacle to finding genuine meaning is the confusion between what you actually value and what you’ve been taught you should value. Cultural, familial, and social conditioning installs “oughts” and “shoulds” that often have little connection to what genuinely resonates with your authentic experience. Many people live for decades in someone else’s definition of a meaningful life before the disconnect becomes impossible to ignore.

Explore your actual values through honest inquiry. When have you felt most alive, most engaged, most like yourself? What activities make time disappear? What causes provoke genuine moral response — anger at injustice, sadness at suffering, inspiration at courage? What would you do with your time if financial considerations were entirely removed? What do you want to be remembered for having done, contributed, or been?

These questions, taken seriously rather than answered quickly, reveal the contours of your genuine values — which is the map to genuine meaning. Write the answers down and revisit them. They tend to change less over time than preferences and moods do — they’re pointing toward something deeper.

Step 2 — Connect Daily Work to a Larger Purpose

Research by Amy Wrzesniewski on what she calls “job crafting” shows that even in the same objective role, different people experience dramatically different levels of meaning based on how they frame their work’s significance. Hospital cleaners who framed their work as “healing facilitation” — emphasising the contribution to patient recovery their cleanliness enabled — reported significantly higher job satisfaction and sense of meaning than those who framed the identical work as “janitorial tasks.”

Meaning is partly in the frame. Whatever your daily work is — and however mundane it may appear from some angles — there are frames in which it connects to something larger: the people it serves, the problems it solves, the skills it develops, the values it expresses. Deliberately identifying and regularly reminding yourself of these larger frames transforms how daily work feels without changing what the work actually is.

Ask: who benefits from what I do? What would be worse in the world if I did this poorly? What is this contributing to that is larger than my immediate output? The answers, honestly arrived at, consistently reveal meaning that the surface appearance of the work conceals.

Step 3 — Invest in Relationships as Your Primary Meaning Source

The most consistent finding in meaning research, across cultures and demographics, is that close relationships are the primary source of meaning for the vast majority of people. Not achievement, not wealth, not status — connection. The relationships that allow you to love and be loved, to be known and to know, to give and receive genuinely, are the most reliable source of the meaning that sustains humans through difficulty.

This finding is both encouraging (relationships are available regardless of circumstance) and challenging (building and maintaining deep relationships requires deliberate investment that busyness and distraction continuously threaten). During difficult periods, the instinct is often to withdraw from relationships to manage or conceal the difficulty. Research on resilience consistently shows this instinct as one of the most reliably counterproductive responses available — connection during difficulty is what sustains, not what should wait until things improve.

Step 4 — Pursue Something Larger Than Yourself

Contribution to something beyond your immediate interests — a community, a cause, a generation, a mission — is one of the most powerful meaning-generators available. Research on volunteering, activism, mentorship, and service consistently shows that giving of oneself to something larger produces both immediate wellbeing benefits and long-term meaning that purely self-focused pursuits rarely generate.

This doesn’t require grand gestures or professional purpose work. Mentoring a junior colleague, regular volunteering, consistent contribution to a community organisation, or sustained attention to raising children who will themselves contribute — all of these constitute contribution to something larger than yourself, and all generate the meaning that sustains through difficult periods.

Step 5 — Practise Gratitude as a Daily Meaning-Amplifier

Gratitude — the deliberate practice of attending to and appreciating what is already good and valuable in your life — is one of the most consistently effective meaning-enhancement practices in the research literature. It works not by creating meaning where none exists, but by directing attention toward meaning that is already present but often overlooked in the rush of daily life.

A daily gratitude practice — writing three to five specific things you’re genuinely grateful for each evening, with enough specificity to actually feel the gratitude rather than list it abstractly — produces measurable improvements in wellbeing, optimism, sleep quality, and sense of meaning within two to four weeks of consistent practice. It is one of the highest-return psychological interventions available in terms of time invested relative to wellbeing benefit. This pairs naturally with the journaling practices covered in our guide to cognitive and emotional journaling for a complete daily reflection practice.

This content is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional mental health advice. If you are experiencing persistent feelings of meaninglessness or hopelessness, please reach out to a qualified mental health professional.