Spiritual health, often overlooked in holistic well-being, deserves greater attention. While physical health has traditionally been the main focus and mental and social health are gaining recognition, spiritual well-being plays a critical role in enhancing overall health. McKinsey Health Institute’s (MHI) global survey of 41,000 people finds that spiritual health matters to many, regardless of age, country, or religious beliefs. Studies further show that fostering spiritual health can significantly improve a person’s physical and mental well-being, not just at home or in society, but also in the workplace.
In this episode of the McKinsey Future of Asia Podcast, host Debbi Cheong sits down with a McKinsey expert panel to explore this topic. She’s joined by Jacqueline Brassey, senior fellow at MHI; Kana Enomoto, partner in Washington D.C. and director of brain health at MHI; and Atsushi Sorita, partner in Tokyo and geographical leader in Japan at MHI. Together, they unpack the findings of MHI’s global survey and discuss the role of spiritual health in the workplace, with a focus on Asia where attitudes toward spiritual health differ across the region. An edited transcript of the conversation follows.
Debbi Cheong: Hello everyone and welcome to McKinsey’s Future of Asia Podcast. I’m Debbi Cheong and I will be your host today. In this episode, we will be talking about spiritual health and why it’s important, as well as how various stakeholders, such as employers, can explore ways to help people find purpose in their lives. I am joined by three McKinsey experts: Jacqueline Brassey, Atsushi Sorita, and Kana Enomoto. Could each of you introduce yourselves to our audience?
Jacqueline Brassey: My name’s Jacqui Brassey. I’m one of the coleaders at the McKinsey Health Institute, coleading healthy workforces and also leading research science across the Institute.
Atsushi Sorita: Hello, I am Atsushi Sorita. I’m a partner in the Tokyo office and I lead healthcare and public sector work in Japan.
Kana Enomoto: I’m Kana Enomoto, a partner in Washington, DC, and also director, brain health at the McKinsey Health Institute.
Debbi Cheong: Thank you for being here today. When we think about holistic health, we often think of things such as physical, mental, or even social health. Very rarely do we include measures such as spiritual health. Jacqui, could you take us through exactly what spiritual health is?
Jacqueline Brassey: I must say that “exactly what spiritual health is” is not that easy to respond to because there are many different ways of looking at it. It’s still a concept that’s being defined and fine-tuned around the world. However, what we see is that there is a core concept in spiritual health around purpose and meaning. When we talk about health, we primarily emphasize the functioning aspect. However, when we defined health in the last studies that we did at the McKinsey Health Institute, we asked people whether they were able to integrate meaning and purpose into their lives, and whether they felt a connection to something larger than themselves. That could be a faith or a god, or something else. This hasn’t been given a lot of attention in research throughout the world.
If you look at the different aspects of holistic health, of which spiritual health is a part, these are mainly physical, social, and mental health. A couple of years ago, we looked at the research emphasis on the different types of health and we saw that it was much more prevalent to find research on physical health—75 percent of the studies investigated health primarily in the physical health space, whereas 12 percent looked at mental health and 6 percent at social health. Then there was only 1 percent that looked at spiritual health. There is growing attention to this aspect, but there is still a lot to learn.
Debbi Cheong: How do you think spiritual health relates to the other dimensions of well-being that you’ve outlined? And why do you think that an institute such as McKinsey Health Institute considers this a core component of holistic health?
Jacqueline Brassey: There is increasing research that shows the link between experiencing spiritual health and holistic well-being. We have done multiple studies where we ask people questions and then look at how the questions are correlated. If we examine the different concepts of holistic health, physical health, mental health, social health, and spiritual health, we see that they’re all highly correlated. In other words, if one element improves, it relates to an improvement in the other elements.
A study, for example, found a link between self-rating by patients on their health and the mortality rate. People who live longer reported having a higher sense of purpose in life related to spiritual health. Other studies looked at how the daily practice of bringing meaning and purpose in life relates to spiritual health, including how it positively impacts people with social anxiety disorder. It was found that it disproportionately impacts those with social anxiety disorders compared to the control group. So, we see a buffering effect and a relationship with different aspects of health.
Kana Enomoto: I would add that, in our own research, we’ve also seen a clear relationship between people with positive spiritual health to other aspects. Among those who said they had good or very good spiritual health, about two-thirds of them also said they had good mental health, good social health, and good physical health. Whereas among those who responded that they had poor or very poor spiritual health, less than 20 percent said they had good mental health and maybe only a quarter of them said they had good social health or physical health. While we can’t say that there is causality, we know that it seems that spiritual health is a really important part of the cluster of holistic health factors.
Debbi Cheong: I want to zoom into a more regional perspective. Atsushi, what factors do you think influence the perceived importance of spiritual health in Asia in particular? Is there variance across Asian countries?
Atsushi Sorita: A notable difference is observed among Asian countries. I think this is partly influenced by the fact that the spiritual health definition is not well understood or shared among different countries in Asia. For example, in the Japanese language, there’s no real direct translation for spiritual health. This affects how respondents of our survey answered the questions. In general, the Asian respondents reported that they put more importance on spiritual health compared to Western countries, with one exception: Japanese respondents put the importance of spiritual health lower that other Asian countries. For example, 80 percent of respondents in Indonesia reported their spiritual health was extremely important to them. On the other hand, Japan had a similar percentage to the United Kingdom at just 45 percent of respondents.
There are a couple of reasons for this that I can see. One is, as I said, that the definition of spiritual health in some languages is unclear. Second, in my interpretation, some countries in Asia are, in a sense, more westernized than others; perhaps people are a bit more materialistic, as opposed to having a spiritual orientation in their lives. Three, in general, Japanese people responded to the survey in a very moderate manner. They tended to choose the middle response as opposed to “extremely” or “very.” Those three factors influenced how the survey responses were varied, even among Asian countries.
Debbi Cheong: Is this difference evident across key demographics or even between cultures in the perception of spiritual health?
Kana Enomoto: There probably are some fundamental differences across cultures, how important people feel their personal beliefs are or how they affect their health and happiness. We didn’t ask in our research about spiritual health, as there are challenges with translation and meaning, and the social implications of that question across countries and languages.
But even on questions of “How important is it you are able to face difficulties with the help of your personal beliefs?” or “To what extent do you feel your life is meaningful?,” we see differences across cultures where, Atsushi, to your point, the Japanese respondents were less likely to pick the response, “I find my life to be extremely meaningful.” They were also more likely to say that they find their lives not at all meaningful. There was a preponderance of people in the neutral or very meaningful categories.
That’s different from say China, India, and Indonesia. For example, a third of the people in India said, “I find my life to be extremely meaningful,” or about a quarter who said, “It’s important to me that I can use personal beliefs to face difficulties.” There are probably some underlying cultural attitudes about how important individual beliefs are with respect to navigating life’s challenges.
Atsushi Sorita: I can second that, especially the fact that 10 percent of Japanese respondents replied “Not at all” to the question, “To what extent do your personal beliefs give you strength to face difficulties?” It is a pessimistic type of answer and, of course, there are many interpretations I could give, but it’s true that it underlines a belief and social circumstances that may be affecting this trend.
Debbi Cheong: What do you think the potential benefits might be for promoting spiritual health to the larger society and to organizations in general? Jacqui, would you like to take this one?
Jacqueline Brassey: The benefits by creating more awareness around this topic and finding ways to integrate it in a meaningful way into lives, potentially at schools and in organizations, are multifold. It has been found that, as a health benefit, it helps people build resilience. In organizational settings, we see that engagement increases. I recently heard a researcher say how it helps people learn three times faster if they do something meaningful and bring purpose into the context as a link to happiness. Recognizing the role of spiritual health can be very beneficial in the context of well-being and simply asking yourself in what ways you find purpose in your life, or how you are helping others find meaning.
This can inspire meaningful conversations and can be implemented in different ways. It can, for example, be done in a positive, helpful way by linking the purpose of your organization to the work that employees do and the impact that you bring to society. This doesn’t have to be an organization in the humanitarian sector or public sector. It can be in any organization where you really think about sustainability and positive impact as an organization.
A demographic where we’ve seen that a lot of this benefit may be brought is to the younger generations that are still finding their place in society and struggling to define what meaning and purpose are. There is a massive opportunity here for learning environments and onboarding programs when younger employees start their careers. There are many ways to integrate it—it starts with awareness and by simply asking a couple of questions.
Kana Enomoto: I was surprised when I looked at our findings to see that it is younger people who find that their spiritual health is important. Everyone thinks their physical and mental health are important; in fact, globally, mental health ekes out physical health in importance. About 85 percent of people think that their mental health is very or extremely important, and about 84 percent think that their physical health is very or extremely important. But regarding social health and spiritual health, older respondents rated them less important than younger respondents. I had thought that older people would be more focused on those things, but in fact it is very important to young people.
What’s really compelling is that, in Asia, holistic health seems to be more evenly divided—you see less of a drop-off between the importance of social health and spiritual health relative to physical and mental. Whereas in Europe, North America, and other Western countries you see more significant drop-offs, so that physical and mental health are very important, and social and spiritual health are somewhat important.
However, over 70 percent of people across the Asian countries that we surveyed, with the exception of Japan, regarded their social and spiritual health almost as important as their physical and mental health. That tells me that, for employers that are operating globally, there are differences in what their employees expect, what they value in their health, what’s offered to them, and how they find meaning in their lives. This affects how important the workplace is to them and how the purpose that they find there affects their sense of general well-being.
Atsushi Sorita: I would like to add two points. One, we need to think hard why research or literature in the past has not focused on spiritual health. I think that the McKinsey Health Institute could propose a definition of it and a way to measure it and collaborate with academic institutions and others to emphasize the importance of spiritual health in the holistic health concept.
Second, health is becoming more complex with an aging society. All the interventions that we’ve seen in the public health domain are on physical health, but that only accounts for a fraction of the entire health spectrum. Social and spiritual interventions are becoming more important, especially as people get older. The population needs to pay more attention to spiritual health; even physicians and practitioners should consider spiritual health as part of holistic health interventions and improvement.
Debbi Cheong: If a business leader is listening in and wants to know how to take their first step to support spiritual health, what would that be?
Jacqueline Brassey: It starts with yourself. Ask yourself the question, “What matters to me, what’s meaningful to me?” and be intentional about this. Consider every morning, “What’s going to be meaningful for me today? What will I focus on?”
Kana Enomoto: One point that I would want business leaders to come away with is that, while spiritual health might seem like a loose concept that doesn’t have relevance to business, there was a study done by Harvard University that found that spirituality was linked to better health outcomes and patient care. Other studies have found that people who felt like their spiritual needs were not met had much higher health care costs, meaning they had worse perceived health. Better spiritual health means less absenteeism, less presenteeism, and less turnover. For employers, there are real economic or business implications as well as keeping their employees as healthy and well as they can.
Atsushi Sorita: Spiritual health is real; any employer needs to believe that. If you believe it, then you should take action.
Debbi Cheong: Thank you, Atsushi, Jacqui, and Kana for your time, and to our listeners for tuning in into the Future of Asia Podcast. If you want to hear or read more about spiritual health or health in general, please head to Mckinsey.com/MHI for more McKinsey Health Institute insights.
