What do Beowulf, Batman and Barbie all have in common? Ancient legends, comic book sagas and blockbuster movies alike share a storytelling blueprint called “the hero’s journey.” This timeless narrative structure, first described by mythologist Joseph Campbell in 1949, describes ancient epics, such as the Odyssey and the Epic of Gilgamesh, and modern favorites, including the Harry Potter, Star Wars and Lord of the Rings series.
Of course, some stories are better than others—some evoke awe and excitement, while others make people yawn. We wondered whether the hero’s journey provides a template for telling a more compelling version of one’s own life story. After all, the hero’s journey lies at the heart of the most culturally significant stories around the world.
With our condensed version of the hero’s journey, we looked at the connection between how people told their life story and their feelings of meaning in life. Across four separate studies, we collected life stories from more than 1,200 people, including online participants and a group of middle-aged adults in Chicago. We also used questionnaires to measure the storytelling participants’ sense of meaning in life, amount of life satisfaction and level of depression.
We then wondered whether altering one’s life story to be more “heroic” would increase feelings of meaning in life. We developed a “restorying” intervention in which we prompted people to retell their story as a hero’s journey. Participants first identified each of the seven elements in their life, and then we encouraged them to weave these pieces together into a coherent narrative.
Furthermore, the intervention increased participants’ tendency to perceive more meaning in general. For instance, after retelling their stories according to our prompts, people were more likely to perceive patterns in seemingly random strings of letters on a computer screen.
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