By Ganga Bey, Greater Good Magazine

Research suggests that having a resilient, expansive identity could protect us from disease and offer hope for repairing societal structures.

“You’re not your body—you’re a spirit soul.”

I often heard this refrain growing up as an unlikely Hindu in a Black body in Cleveland, Ohio. While this idea may sound foreign to many in the Western world, it is foundational in several Eastern philosophies, which teach that attachment to the physical body as the self is a root cause of suffering.

Now, as a social theorist and epidemiologist studying population health, I often reflect on that early lesson. I see more clearly than ever that the supposed divide between science and spirituality is a false one. Our conceptions of self—fundamentally spiritual ideas about who and what we are—are not merely abstract philosophies. They are measurable, powerful determinants of health and well-being. And in this age of preventable crises—climate change, hunger, economic inequality, disease—they may be one of our most untapped resources for survival and flourishing.

I can’t say this realization surprised me. All my life, I watched my mother embody a belief in herself first as a soul connected to all other souls. This conviction guided her through a life defined by compassion, gratitude, advocacy, sacrifice, and countless other generosities of spirit—qualities consistently linked to better mental and physical health. And indeed, my mother was a model of both. While many of her family and community members developed chronic illnesses as they aged—diabetes, heart disease, premature cognitive decline, bipolar disorder—my mother, whom many called Mata, the Sanskrit word for “mother,” remained remarkably vital throughout her life.

Mata’s health thrived despite the immense challenges she faced: gendered abuse, poverty, racism, and other forms of trauma—stressors that weigh hardest upon marginalized populations in inequitable societies. Drawn to understanding health from a young age, I often pondered the nature of her resilience. What made her so strong? Was it her disidentification with the physical body that was so protective? And could others cultivate that same resilience?

For much of my youth, I wanted to be a physician. I entered college intent on majoring in biology and becoming a cardiologist. The heart somehow seemed at the center of every illness I saw in the Black and Brown communities where I grew up. But during my second year at Princeton, a medical anthropology course shifted my understanding of health entirely. I began to see that the diseases of the heart in my community weren’t simply biological—they were social, born from inequality, racism, and chronic exposure to toxic stress. I changed my major to Anthropology and African American Studies but stayed on the pre-med track, determined to bridge biology and society in my understanding of health.

Still, something kept tugging at me: Mata’s quiet, steady strength. Even as I came to understand how social structures shape health outcomes, I couldn’t stop thinking about the inner posture that had sustained her. What role did her spiritual sense of identity play in her resilience?

As an epidemiologist, I became fascinated by how self-identification might buffer people from the health impacts of chronic stress. While many health disparities scholars focus on structural determinants, I saw an opportunity to integrate insights from Eastern philosophy, social psychology, and population health to bring to light understudied sources of resilience. In the first year of my doctoral program, I began to formalize this integration into what I now call the Identity Vitality–PathologyTM (IVP) model.

The model was inspired directly by Mata’s example. I identified three key dimensions of her belief in the self as distinct from the physical body that I believed were central to its health-protective power: a sense of self that includes all living beings, a belief in the intrinsic and immutable worth of all life, and a natural compassion that flows from this recognition of shared value. Together, these qualities form what I call identity vitality—a loving state of being rooted in connection and compassion that is directed toward self and others.

By contrast, when a person defines selfhood narrowly—through physical characteristics, social status, or the exclusion of “others”—they fall into what I call identity pathology. This state, I argue, is inherently harmful, both to self and society, because it constrains compassion and ultimately reinforces inequity. We all exist somewhere along this spectrum. Those who orient toward identity vitality, I hypothesize, are more resilient to the health effects of chronic stress, while those oriented toward identity pathology are more vulnerable.

How does identity vitality protect health?

Stress, after all, is a curious companion to health. In brief doses, it helps us adapt and grow. But chronic, unrelenting stress—like the social burdens imposed upon marginalized people—erodes health across every system of the body. Over time, it accelerates aging and contributes to conditions from diabetes and heart disease to Alzheimer’s and cancer. Yet not everyone is equally affected. Some people, like Mata, seem buffered from many of its worst effects. Genetics play a role, yes—but perhaps so does how we see ourselves and the world. I theorize that identity vitality is a key factor that shapes whether stress becomes toxic or transformative.

To test this theory, I developed a questionnaire to measure identity vitality and pathology. In my lab—the Healthy Aging with Resilient Identities (HARI) Lab—our research explores whether cultivating a vitalized identity can promote healthier aging.

The empirical evidence, though early, is promising. In studies including more than 2,700 Black and white adults aged 18 to 81, we found that greater identity vitality was consistently linked with lower risk of depression, even after accounting for many other relevant factors. The relationship showed a striking “dose-response” effect: As identity vitality increased, the risk of depression declined by as much as 90%. In another study, Black women with higher identity vitality had a 50% lower risk of hypertension associated with neighborhood disadvantage. Among men experiencing severe financial strain, those with higher identity vitality also reported better overall health. These findings suggest that the way we understand who we are may literally shape how our bodies bear stress.

Can identity vitality really improve population health outcomes?

I use the terms vitalized and pathologized deliberately to emphasize that identity states are constructed—and, thus, potentially modifiable. We are all taught, implicitly or explicitly, what to believe about who we are and what gives us worth. But those lessons can be unlearned and relearned at any point in life. If identity vitality can be cultivated, then perhaps resilience itself is teachable.

My confidence in that idea was shaken when my mother was diagnosed with an aggressive uterine cancer at 65 during my final year of doctoral training. Less than two years later, she had physically departed. Her passing forced me to confront painful questions. How could someone so mindful of her health, whose deep and practical spiritual beliefs guided every aspect of her life—including her health behaviors—succumb to such an aggressive, merciless illness?

In grief, I found a new kind of clarity. In a certain way, my mother’s life and death mirrored an ongoing debate in public health: Can individual-level interventions—those targeting mindset, belief, or behavior—truly move the needle on population-level outcomes when the structures at the root of health disparities remain? My mother’s identity vitality had clearly buffered her from many stress-related diseases. Yet even her profound resilience couldn’t entirely protect her from the deeper structural inequities that shape who gets sick with what illness.

Non-Hispanic Black women are nearly twice as likely as women of other racial and ethnic groups to die from uterine cancers. Stressors stemming from structural inequities—rooted in racism, sexism, and economic inequality—accumulate in the body in ways that even the most resilient spirit may not overcome. Because my mother had largely avoided the chronic conditions so often tied to lifestyle and behavior, I began to wonder if I had been somewhat blinded to the constraints imposed by structural inequity.

Over time, however, I came to see that this harsh reality didn’t negate the promise of identity vitality—it offered a path for greater healing. I now see identity vitality as both a conduit for individual resilience and a catalyst for collective transformation. The same beliefs that protect us from stress on the personal level—seeing all beings as valuable, releasing attachment to hierarchy or status—may also dismantle the systems that create inequity and, with them, the need for resilience itself.

These systems persist because so many of us are taught to derive our worth from perceiving ourselves as superior to others. If more of us underwent what I call a vitalizing transformation—a shift from self-worth based on comparison to self-worth rooted in universal connection, intrinsic value, and compassion for ourselves and others—then the decision points that sustain inequity might begin to shift, as well.

Were we able to create an identity inoculant, perhaps we could begin to heal the social diseases of dominance the way we once eradicated polio and smallpox—through collective courage, compassion, and persistence. The turning points that sustain or undo systems of power are not abstract; they live within human choices. Each decision to reinforce hierarchy or to dismantle it is shaped by the identity state of the decision maker. The more people who see themselves as connected rather than separate—as part of a family of all living beings rather than a social ladder—the more our collective choices will tilt toward justice and care, for ourselves, for each other, and for the earth.

As those levers of power slowly shift, individuals, too, would feel the change ripple inward. Our values might evolve; our ideas about leadership might expand. We might begin to choose and elevate those whose sense of worth is grounded in the recognition that all living beings are inherently valuable, in inclusion rather than exclusion. And even as systems transform at their own pace, every person retains an immediate source of power—the ability to vitalize their own identity, to nurture health and compassion within themselves, and to model a way of being that quietly reshapes the world around them.

The next steps

This next phase of my work—understanding how identity states are transmitted and how they might be transformed at scale—is still in its early stages. But I find comfort and inspiration in knowing that the lesson my mother lived by was more than spiritual poetry. It was an early glimpse into a phenomenon that natural science is only beginning to quantify.

I’m not sure whether we are not our bodies—and perhaps the journey toward that answer extends beyond what any physical science can tell. My work does give me confidence, however, that what we believe about who we are matters profoundly for our capacity to sustain our health, even in the face of tremendous stress. More important, our decision to see all living beings as part of ourselves—to engage in this loving practice of extending our ego boundaries to include others, to accept the intrinsic worth of every being, and to offer compassion generously—may be among the most powerful public health interventions we could ever implement. 

Keywords; love, health, psychology