How to Cultivate Purpose in Mental Health Recovery

By Kimberly Nelson & Emma Lovejoy, with Becky Shipkosky

What does purpose mean to you? If we’re honest, many of us don’t spend much time considering it, but it is kind of a big deal (Leonard, Kreitzer, 2024).

The most basic definition of the word is, “reason for existence.” It’s why we get up in the morning and keep going when the going gets tough.

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Association (SAMHSA) includes purpose as one of the four major dimensions of mental health recovery. To place that into context, the recovery model of mental health care is, alongside the medical model, a standard paradigm. Person-centered, patient-directed, and holistic, it helps patients live full and fulfilling lives not defined by their diagnoses (Lyon, 2023).

The Role of Purpose in Mental Health Recovery

Along with SAMHSA’s other three recovery model dimensions—health, home, and community—purpose provides the following benefits to patients in mental health recovery:

• A platform to rise above basic survival thoughts and actions (Jacob, 2015).
• A reason to get out of bed on days when their emotional or mental state might dictate otherwise.
• A sense of empowerment and agency that may have previously eluded the patient.
• Building blocks to create a structure for the life they want to live.
• Reduction in depression and anxiety symptoms (Boreham, Schutte, 2023)

Virtually any recovery-based mental health program will include a strong purpose component and can help its clients establish their own sense of purpose. But what if you or your loved one don’t have access to residential, partial hospitalization, or therapist-led programs? How might you begin to cultivate purpose for yourself or support a loved one in doing so?

Doing for Yourself: Bootstrapping Purpose

It may seem impossible to create purpose for yourself where perhaps none currently exists, but there are a few tried-and-true practices successfully employed in recovery programs, which you can do at home:

• What’s working? Start with lists of what’s working and what isn’t. What needs to change in your life, and what do you want to keep?
• Regular mindfulness practice. Set aside 10 to 30 minutes each day, or even a couple of days per week to just sit and cultivate awareness. Use at least part of this time to decide what your intentions are for the present day.
• Daily accomplishment. What’s something you can do every day to improve your life? Ideas include: doing art or a craft for at least 30 minutes, writing 500 words, playing Legos with your child for at least 45 minutes, having a conversation with one person, laughing three times, doing the dishes, or showering. Wherever you are in your process, these daily things can add up to an overarching sense of purpose within a short time.
• Dream statement. What do you want your life to look like in a year or three years? This can be basic: “I want to be happy and stable.” Or it can be more detailed and specific: “I want to buy a house and begin renovations for a short-term rental in a portion of the house. Once that’s finished, I want to work 20 hours per week at my job and spend 10 hours a week writing a novel.” Review your dream statement periodically and revise it as desired.
• Nuts and bolts. Make a list of steps you’ll need to take. What smaller goals might contribute to making you happy and increasing stability? If you want to buy a house, for example, how can you save a down payment or establish credit? Break it down into as many tiny steps as you need, working towards one at a time.
• Get involved in a cause. A few ideas include your neighborhood garden, a literacy program, church outreach, a local political effort, or community events such as your local Mardi Gras or holiday parade.

Life’s challenges will always pop up, and you may miss a daily writing session or a dream statement review. It’s important to remember that you can always pick it up again tomorrow or next month, because some is better than none!

Supporting a Loved One in Creating Purpose

Maybe you are not personally experiencing mental illness, but your child, parent, spouse, or other loved one is. There are ways you can support them in cultivating purpose for themselves:

• Open-ended questions. When your loved one is amenable to talking, ask them open-ended questions about what they want to do—today, in the immediate future, long term. What changes might they like to make in their life? How could they begin to make those changes?
• Affirmation. As your friend or family member talks about what they want, verbally identify strengths they possess that can help them in achieving it.
• Active listening. Repeat back to them what you hear them saying. Rephrasing and interpreting can offer new perspectives, but it’s important not to infuse your own ideas. It’s important to make these conversations about them and what they want for themselves.
• Support their vision. What else can you do to help your loved one in achieving their vision? Maybe you’re in a position to provide material support such as money or other resources. But, encouraging them, helping them plan, and showing up with gentle accountability can also be monumental. Simply being believed in can change everything for a person.

The process described above borrows heavily from a method called motivational interviewing; you can learn more about it here.

Conclusion

Many of us lack an in-built sense of purpose—or we may have one, but then mental health challenges throw us off course, changing everything. Recovery can feel like starting over when it comes to basic things like why we wake up in the morning. The steps laid out here can help you or your loved one begin to rebuild (or build for the first time) this major facet of good mental health.

And if you’ve read this far but don’t yourself struggle with significant mental health challenges, you might be thinking that you could use some of these methods to improve your life, too. And you’d be right! So much of the work that helping professionals do to support their mental health clients overlaps with basic life-coaching philosophy. So, by all means, cultivate your purpose!