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Ever wonder how some people seem to meet their fitness goals with ease and love eating healthy foods while others constantly struggle to do either? According to a new study from the Communication Neuroscience Lab at the Annenberg School, people with stronger life purpose are more likely to accept messages promoting health behavior change than those with a weaker sense of purpose. Purpose in life has been robustly associated with health in previous studies, but the mechanism through which life purpose may promote healthy living has been unclear. For this study, researchers chose to test out a theory: that making health decisions might take less effort for those with higher sense of purpose in life. To test this idea, the researchers recruited sedentary people who needed to exercise more. Participants completed a survey about their life purpose by indicating the degree to which they agreed or disagreed with statements like “I have a sense of direction and purpose in my life" or "I don't have a good sense of what it is I'm trying to accomplish in life." Next, they were shown health messages promoting physical activity. Their responses to the messages were monitored by an fMRI scanner, focusing on brain regions that tend to be active when people aren’t sure what to choose or when they feel conflicted. Those participants who reported a stronger sense of life purpose were more likely to agree with the health messages and to have less activity in brain regions associated with conflict-processing. In fact, the researchers were able to predict how likely it was that a person would agree with health messages based on the degree of brain activity in these regions. This study does a nice job starting to unpack reasons why people who have a higher sense of purpose in life might be more able to take advantage of this messaging when they encounter it. Source: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/05/190514143248.htm