“Our findings suggest that people can improve their mental health by raising or maintaining high levels of tenacity, resilience and optimism,” she said. “Aspiring toward personal and career goals can make people feel like their lives have meaning. On the other hand, disengaging from striving toward those aims or having a cynical attitude can have high mental health costs.”
No they don't. Your findings suggest that people who have more perseverance have reduced risk of depression and anxiety later in life. Additional research would be needed to prove that "we can increase perseverance by aspiring towards goals", and that "increasing perseverance reduces that individuals risk of anxiety and depression". And I would be very surprised if both of these are true.
Thanks for that. It was the first thing I thought when reading this.
Kind of a given that people with less sense of purpose would be more prone to anxiety/depression.
It’s why my anxiety always rematerializes when it turns out that the current company is a hellhole too. Can’t have a sense of purpose when everything is pointless.
The article in question used a lagged design, using temporally prior markers to predict later change. This is not fully causal, but it's not fully correlative either. In the field, it's consider to provide preliminary causal evidence. Still needs additional research to be sure.
It's better than straight correlation, but given the historical track records of these studies turning into a reproducible intervention of clinical significance I'd say the chances are low. The article event mentions this with
> Unlike in previous research, Zainal and Newman did not find that self-mastery, or feeling in control of one’s fate, had an effect on the mental health of participants across the 18-year period.
Sure. But in my experience, what works better is remembering happy times. Or rather, represencing happy states.
And once I'm being happy and optimistic, it's natural to persevere and accomplish stuff more effectively, and I have desired results. That is, "be -> do -> have". Which is just the opposite of the western cultural default of "have -> do -> be". As in: "If I were wealthy, I could do all this fun stuff, and then I'd be happy."
No they don't. Your findings suggest that people who have more perseverance have reduced risk of depression and anxiety later in life. Additional research would be needed to prove that "we can increase perseverance by aspiring towards goals", and that "increasing perseverance reduces that individuals risk of anxiety and depression". And I would be very surprised if both of these are true.