There's such beautiful research on mindsets now about just change the way you think about the things you have to do so you get the things you need from the things you have to do.
Welcome to the one you feed Throughout time. Great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not
just about thinking our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, them how they feed their good wolf.
When I saw the title of today's guests book, Languishing, How to Feel Alive Again in a world that wears us down, I knew this conversation had to happen, because really, who hasn't felt worn down by life and is someone who's wrestled with staying connected to what makes me feel alive. This topic hit home today. I'm talking with Corey Keys, the researcher who coined the term languishing. It's that space between mental illness and thriving, a state of stagnation that
often goes unnoticed. Corey's work explores how we can move from this gray zone into flourishing, where purpose, connection, and vitality live. If you've ever felt stuck in neutral, just getting through your days but not really living them, this conversation is for you. Let's explore what it takes to feel alive again. Hi, Corey, Welcome to the show.
Greetings Eric.
When I heard the title of your book, I immediately was like, all right, I need to talk to this guy. Sometimes I see a book where we have a guest idea and I send it to my producer Nicole, and we talk about it and we debate. But every once in a while, I'm like, just book this one. So you were in the just book this one category based on the title, which is languishing, how to feel alive
again in a world that wears us down? And as we get into the conversation, I think we will talk about my own thoughts and challenges around feeling alive, and so it's a topic that means a lot to me. But we'll start like we always do, with the parable. And in the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild and they say, in life, there's two wolves
inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other's a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.
Well, it means the world to me. I used it in my book, and I have used it in almost every talk I believe it or not. I usually use it right at the end because I use that parable and I talk about the wolf being motivated by fear or love, and we're feeding the wolf of fear when it comes to illness, disease, and death. And that's where public health and even medicine has been focused. And we're not feeding the wolf that comes from love, health well
being what I would call the health span. And I usually end by saying, I'm very hungry to start focusing on health and feeding the wolf of love, because I think we've been focused too much, believe it or not, on illness and increasing life expected see and putting death at day, and yet we're struggling to add healthy longevity to our lives. Yeah, and that's what my book is really about when it comes to mental health, adding good mental health rather than focusing only on mental illness.
So something I'm going to be doing a little more often is ask you, the listener, to reflect on what you're hearing. We strongly believe that knowledge is power, but only if combined with action and integration. So before we move on, I'd like to ask you what's coming up for you as you listen to this. Are there any things you're currently doing or feeding your bad wolf that might make sense to remove, or any things you could
do to feed your good wolf that you're not currently doing. So, if you have the headspace for it, I'd love if you could just pause for a second and ask yourself, what's one thing I could do today or tonight to feed my good Wolf. Whatever your thing is. A really useful strategy can be having something external, a prompt or a friend, or a tool that regularly nudges you back
towards awareness and intentionality. For the past year, I've been sending little Goodwolf reminders to some of my friends and community members, just quick, little SMS messages two times per week that give them a little bit of wisdom and remind them to pause for a second and come off autopilot. If you want, I can send them to you too. I do it totally for free, and people seem to really love them. Just drop your information at oneufeed dot net slash sms and I can send them to you.
It's totally free, and if you end up not liking the little reminders, you can easily opt out. That's one you feed dot net slash sms. And now back to the episode. I'm glad you use that parable and I'm glad you set us up in that way. I think it gives us a lot of fruitful directions we can go. I want to start off by just asking a question to see if I can orient what you're doing in
the context of psychology in a broader sense. Certainly. For most of psychology's history, it was focused on mental illness, right, It was solving neurosies and the various different things we called it and all of that. And then there was a period of time where there became a movement called positive psychology that was really about, like, well, what does it look like for humans that are thriving? Where is
what you're doing oriented in that? It sounds like it's on the positive psychology side, And yet I don't see that as a term that you're using, So help me place you. This is just more for my nerdiness probably than any actually useful, useful conversation. But I can't resist asking.
I straddle both worlds actually because I want to take mental illness very seriously, and I believe we can prevent it by going in the direction that I'm trying to chart, which is focus on mental health is more than the absence.
I was there at the beginning of positive psychology. But long before positive psychology came along, there was the successful aging research networks that came into existence easily a decade or more before, and it was funded very generously and graciously by the MacArthur Foundation, and I was one of the members of a very select group of people from around the world that were brought in as young scholars to work with also very senior scholars around the world
who were focusing on successful aging, knowing that we were living in an aging world right and that we needed to be prepared and we needed to learn from people who are aging. What we were calling successfully now that's a bit of a loaded word, and people of trying to deconstruct it, I don't even want to go there. I know what they were talking about. They wanted to look at how people maintain health and well being despite
the challenges and the losses that come with aging. How do we adapt, compensate, optimize, call.
It what you want.
And if it was not for the MacArthur Foundation that supported this research, which created a longitudinal studies that are still going today. Eric in twenty five we will have our third wave of data that we will collect on respondents. And this data set is available to people around the world and they have been mining it for beautiful things
that actually fed positive psychology. And I was there at the beginning, but I really don't identify much with positive psychology because I didn't know what their why was, what their purpose was I want to just focus on the positive so we could address suffering in the world that wasn't being addressed very effectively, and also a problem if there were that we weren't even paying attention to. And that's why languishing came into a being, because that was
a problem that wasn't on anybody's radar. And so to me, it wasn't enough to say, I want people be happy. Why why what are you going to fix in the world? And to me, languishing was an unidentified problem. And I also believe that if we promoted what I call flourishing, we could prevent a lot of mental illness, not all, but a lot of it, because we can't cure mental illness and we're not even doing a very good job at managing it, to tell you the truth.
Yeah, one of the things that's really interesting in your book is this idea of flourishing. And we're going to define flourishing and languishing here in a second, But was this idea that you can be flourishing and we'll talk about what that means and have a mental health condition, and that flourishing doesn't necessarily eliminate the mental health condition, but makes it better or more livable, and can have a certain amount of prevention. But that being mentally well
doesn't mean the absence of all mental illness. It also can mean the of these positive things. Yeah, so say what you'd like about that, and then let's maybe define languishing and flourishing before we get too far in here.
I love that you brought that up right away, because it is central. Now. I could go on about all the studies that verify back up what I'm about to say. It's there in the book. But for people who have mental disorders depression, anxiety, even schizophrenia, when they experience full recovery I call full recovery, when they're moving towards flourishing, they're much less likely to relapse or have a recurrence
of that mental disorder. And the way I think of it is they stay in recovery, full recovery far longer. For me personally, because I have two mental disorders, actually three. When I am flourishing, my mental illness recedes into the background. Indeed, even go I put it away in the closet, so to speak, it's there. Yeah, every time I wake up and I go into my clauset, I know it's there,
it's hanging on the rack. But today I'm not wearing it because my life has purpose, I have a sense of contribution, I'm growing, I have all those things that we'll talk about shortly that go into the ingredients of flourishing. So in order to really recover from mental illness, as we say in the addiction world, you're recovered, but your disease is always there, but it recedes into the background, and what's foreground is your mental health or what I call flourishing.
Yeah. I think a lot of people will debate, you know, and they do debate what recovery in addiction looks like, Right, what does that mean? I'm a recovering drug addict and alcoholic, and this time around, I'm sixteen, coming up maybe on seventeen years sober, and so I like the way you said it. It's kind of in the closet. In my case, it's way back in the clause. It hasn't been pulled out in years. But I've had experiences in the past when I say this go around, it means I had
sobriety before and then didn't you know. I tend to believe that, like you said, it's there but I think what's so interesting also is in how we define ourselves according to those things. It's easy for me to sort of think of addiction as I've recovered and it's kind of in the background, it's still there. Something like depression is a whole different sort of animal to kind of
wrap my head around what's my relationship to it. Because sobriety is easy to measure, just not there, use you don't use, But things like depression start to look like things that you call languishing. And these are more subtle distinctions. I almost wish that the clarity of addiction was was able to bring it to other areas.
Yes, I think for me at least because I also have depression and alcoholism as well as PTSD, I agree wholeheartedly with you. I mean, the issue for me alcoholism is that in one sense we all think about it, I'm just not picking up right. Well, it's so much more than that. It is about regaining a whole different new way of living in a world right, And that I think is true of depression as much as it is of alcoholism. Except it I don't love it or
hate it for some people. I love my AA program because we do it with each other and for each other, because nobody else.
Can do it for us.
And yet when it comes to depression, we've kind of given it over to experts, as if I can't really take care of myself, And so sometimes we create a mindset that we catastrophize. When I start to feel sad, I'm thinking, oh, no, here comes the beast, when in fact, it's like I should just say, wow, isn't that interesting, just like my Buddhist friend. Oh, I'm feeling sad. Now,
let's explore that. And we are talking with some people about this, I have no one to talk about when it comes to depression.
So let me ask a question there, because I've often wondered about this, and as somebody who's been on the inside of the mental health world, something like addiction has these support groups. I mean, I think it's wonderful today that twelve step groups are one of the support group options that are available. There's more of them, but there's a host of them, and people do tend to turn
to them for this thing. And I've often wondered, why does that sort of thing not exist for something like depression or anxiety or mental health more broadly, and I'm curious if you have any theories on why why doesn't it exist. We see peer support groups pop up in lots of areas, but we just have never seen peer support group gain much traction in this area. And I don't fully understand why.
It's perplexing to me. Because doctors admitted early on to Bill and Bob that there's nothing I can do for you. That's not the case when it comes to depression. We're given this false sense of hope. And people won't like when I say it, because I'm on those damn medications myself, but they don't cure me anywhere close to it. And yet we have these experts who keep telling me and everyone else, well, I can help you, I can make
you better. That wasn't the case for most addictions, and it certainly wasn't a story that I know right when Bill and Bob were starting, right, so they had to figure it out for themselves. And yet we go into therapies with clinical psychologists and we do all this talking, so it's not unlike sharing that we do in the
rooms in NA or AA. And yet I think because we have this expert out there that we share with, we don't believe that we have much to learn from each other, the other patients, And I think that's such a wrong headed thing because I think we've handed over our own ability to help each other to these experts, these clinical psychologists and psychiatrists. And they're necessary, but I don't think they're sufficient.
Yeah. I have a lot of thoughts and theories myself also of why we don't have more of that. I agree talking to an expert is sharing, but it's a different kind of sharing. It's a very different kind of sharing because generally you're a psychologist or your therapist or whatever, isn't then turning around and going me too.
Me too right, me too right?
Oh I've been there, yeah, I mean, god just last week. I also think that what twelve step programs have and what a lot of other support groups that I've seen have, is they have a clear, defined program. I mean, talking and sharing and identifying is a big part of it, but there's also here are the things that we do right right. I think most attempts at peer groups around depression or mental illness lack that. There's not Yes, I
understand you, I recognize what you're doing. You feel heard by me, you feel seen by me, and now you can do the things that I did. I think that's an element of you know, if you look at what makes some of these programs work, there's the people, the connection, but there's also a program, and you can argue how useful a particular program is. Is the twelve steps the
best way? Probably not, but you know what, it's a way, right, It's a path, and it's a way of allowing you to take very specific actions in a direction that points, at least for a lot of people towards health.
It is, and I blok sometimes when I hear people say, well, let's take the AA twelve step kind of approach and apply it to mental illness, I think that it's of Eric would be a little wrong headed, because I love the steps because there's so closely allied with the fact that we've reached the level of demoralization and humiliation and a loss of a sense of life that we have to rebuild that are baked into those steps, agreed, So
we have to redeem ourselves, reclaim ourselves. Yes, and mental illness has enough of the morality issues hanging over to stigmatize it. So we need to really think a new agreed when it comes to a program that would be step like for depression and anxiety. But I think we could if we really put ourselves to the task.
I think that you're right. I mean, the twelve steps. I would argue, even for a lot of people who have addiction issues, may not even be the right path, right. Certainly, people who are wrestling with severe depression don't need to be focusing on their character defects, right, Like they've got that pretty well, pretty well sorted. All right, So this is a rabbit hole we could spend the whole conversation on. And I'd love to just sit here and brainstorm what
this program looks like. But we're going to move on so that we get sort of re anchored here a little bit. And I want to talk about languishing. So what is languishing? Give us the history of sort of how it evolved for you as a way of thinking, and what it is, and how is it different from other things that it sort of looks.
Like, Yeah, well, let's start with that last part of your question. For most people, it seems a lot like depression, even shall we say minor depression. Let's course distinguish it. Then I want to jump back into how they blend together. Okay, first thing is depression is the presence of negative symptoms. If we were to look at the psychiatric manual, we would see the presence of negative emotions and a loss of interest in life, and then several forms of malfunctioning,
really problematic functioning. Languishing is the absence of very positive things, very positive symptoms. What you're missing are the feelings that come around what we might call joy, happiness, interest in life, and interest in life is the only overlapping symptoms, right right, Yes, and then the rest are what I call these signs of functioning. Well, I measure purpose. Does your life have
direction and meaning? I measure a sense of contribution. Are you contributing things of worth and value to your family, community, workplace, sense of growth, and so forth? So you can be free of negative things right that go to depression and not have any of the positive things are either. And that's an interesting category because that's why I've used the phrase and that I'm picked up on what I've used in my talks. That why languishing is the middle child
in between things like depression and flourishing. It's stuck there, right in the middle. There's a lot of people who are free of negative symptoms like anxiety and depression. They might have a few, but they don't meet the criteria diagnosable disorder. And yet they don't meet the criteria for flourishing either. They're stuck in the middle, but by the same token. Here's where things get really confusing, because clinicians want to tell me languishing is part of the depression,
and I say, yes, it is. For most people with a mental disorder. They're languishing to some degree, mildly, moderately, or sometimes severely. Just because you've gone into the realm of a mental disorder, it doesn't mean you've left languishing at the door. It comes along with you, and often it's the gatekeeper. It's often why people end up with mental illness. And so here's the thing. You could be trussed and languishing at the same time. Most people are.
And yet here's the mystery to me. We attribute all the problems that people with a mental illness have to their mental disorder. When languishing is they're causing easily half, if not more, of the problems. It's not just depression causing the problem. It's the languishing that comes along, it's also causing the problem, and so you can have both.
You talked about depression being a lot of negative symptoms and poor functioning, and I love the idea that with certain people you can remove And I would say this is the case for me, right, Like the real gross levels of suffering are gone, right. I mean I used to be a homeless heroin addict. Right, I am so much better. I used to suffer with depression that made it hard to get out of bed. I never have that problem, right that, That's not what I'm talking about
at all. And in my more honest moment, right, if I were to chart my journey, I would say something very similar to what you said, which is I've gotten rid of the real suffering. And I think if you put the twenty three year old me in my brain, he would think he was enlightened. The difference is so stark. But the fifty three year old me doesn't know as much about joy and peak moments of happiness and all
these different things that he would like. You know, I figured out how to eliminate a lot of suffering, but I haven't figured out how to strongly amplify good feelings. Now here's where things get tricky. I'm a former Heroin addict. Right to me, feeling good is way up here, right, Like, I have this idea in my mind, you should feel like that. People don't feel like they feel like when they're on Heroin. Like that's not normal day to day functioning.
So where I get caught up A lot is going Okay, we talk about having more joy, more positive emotions, what are we talking about? What's the reasonable level of someone? And that's where I kind of get hung up and I don't know what to say. Am I languishing? If you look at functioning and a lot of your book is about functioning. If you look at functioning, I'm in no way, shape or form languishing. My life is filled
with purpose. I play, I learn, I mean, all your vitamins, connection, Like I function, I think at a pretty high level on all those things. But my mood is not like way up there. It's in this sort of grayer area. So is that languishing? Is that flourishing? And like I said to you before, sometimes I'm like, well, maybe that's just my temperament. Maybe I need to stop monkeying with it all worrying about it and just go, you know what,
that's just kind of who you are. I love the nuance of it, but I also dislike the ambiguity of it when it comes to trying to sort things out in my own head. Yeah.
Yeah, the feeling functioning thing. That's the real challenge for us who are trying to come off of this artificial, almost explosive dopamine rush that you can't get anywhere else right, You just can't. It takes a long time to recalibrate that, and for many of us it takes a lifetime because I don't think you quite want to trust it, because there is this sneaking suspicion even if you're just feeling it and you're not using it, you're like, oh boy,
I shouldn't go down there. But having said that, even though I would call what you're experiencing some degree of languishing, there's interesting combinations that are worth mentioning here. Now when I split apart the criteria for feeling good versus functioning well in my research, let's nerd out just a little
bit so I can get to your point. There was twelve to thirteen percent of US college students who would be flourishing according to my criteria when it came to functioning well, that meant that every day or almost every day, they experienced at least six out of the eleven signs of functioning well. But they did not meet the criteria for feeling good because they didn't report either interest in life, happiness, or satisfaction with life every day or almost every day
in the past two weeks or past month. That group, thirteen percent of them had one of three mental disorders in the past two weeks, compared to less than four percent of those students who were flourishing, who put the
feeling good with the functioning well. Every study I've ever done, eric, when you're flourishing, when you meet the criteria for feeling good, you just have to have one out of three interested in life, satisfied or happy every day or almost every day, just one combined with at least six out of eleven signs of functioning well. They're always doing better than the group, even the group that's functioning well. They're flourishing when it
comes to functioning well. But here's the interesting thing. There's a even larger group of young people who would meet the criteria for flourishing only when it came to feeling good, but they're not flourishing when it comes to functioning well. Now, that group too, is almost twenty five percent of the US college student population. They feel good about life where they're not functioning well, their life doesn't have purpose, belonging, contribution,
growth and all that. Twenty one percent of them met the criteria in the past two weeks for depression, anxiety, or a panic attack, compared to less than four percent. But it gets worse the more severe you're languishing. It's better to be flourishing in at least one out of the two than it is to have moderate to severe languishing. Right, But it's always better eric to be flourishing for some reason.
That combination is just magical. So you're doing well, and I know those moments you're describing where I'm functioning well, I'm growing, I'm learning. But you know, there's a lot of times when you're functioning well that you've had to go through a lot of effort to get there, and it doesn't feel good.
Yeah, yeah, Harry.
Growth is not everything it's cracked up to be. It doesn't create happiness. So there's people it makes sense when it comes to mental illness. They're not doing as well as those people who are flourishing, but it's always better than having severe language and trust.
Me right, And I think where this gets even more tricky, There's two things I want to push on here. The first is when we say things like interest in life, well, how interested? Like you know what I mean? Like this is really to me very subtle, like I would say I'm interested in life. But that's where I sort of get hung up, is like it's this question of what is enough right anything? And then I think the second thing that's really interesting and I've thought a lot about
this since I had the conversation. I had the conversation with the psychologist Paul Bloom, and he talked about two sort of ways that people measure well beings generally, and the one is you ask people how satisfied they are at intervals, You say, how satisfied are you with your life in these various areas, and people report things. The other is you ask people how are you feeling right now? And so what I think is interesting is that you can have a gap between those things. You can have
people who say I'm satisfied with my life. My life is good. You know, I would fall into this category. I'm satisfied. I mean, my life is great, right, Like, I mean, in so many ways my life is outstanding. But if you ask me at certain moments, how do you feel, I might say, eh, you know, I mean, that would be my reaction, you know. And this gets to also thinking about like what is our mood system
wired up to look? Like, you know, does everybody have the same capacity or you know, I've heard about like happiness set points. You know, where do these things land? And so I also think that when we start to take on labels, that gets interesting. It's a different way of viewing myself in the world. If I say I'm very satisfied with my life, things are going really well. The things that matter to me are all in place, and you know what, I have sort of a lower
than average mood system versus to say I'm languishing. That difference there matters in how I see and view myself. And I'm just I don't mean to turn this into a conversation about me, but I'm like close to the target audience. Now, there's a lot of people who are languishing much more severely, and I think I want to
turn my attention to that in a second. But I think what we're talking about are these these sort of edge states, And I'm just curious how you think about those things for yourself, because I suspect you're similar.
Yeah, I go round and I with psychologists about this. Daniel Konnaman wanted to say, there's experienced happiness, which is valid, and then there's remembered happiness, which is I can't trust it right exactly. Yes, Well, my take on that always is we're storytellers.
For you.
Sometimes ten moments in one day of happiness will not equal the summary that this was a good day, because you could have been dedicating yourself to moments of happiness that had very little meaning to you, yet they felt right at the moment. If I recorded your experience, it felt good because I was working on something interesting.
Or conversely, I could have slept bad last night and be working on really meaningful things and just sort of been like, you know, I didn't feel great, but I was there, right, I did what mattered to me.
Yeah, but you did it, and you did it to the best of your ability, and you could end up saying, well, that was a day well spent. That was a really good day even though you know it didn't feel great.
Yeah.
So to me, life is not made up of moments, even though it is in reality, and whether we have peak moments or valleys, you know, I think the way stories end matter.
Yeah.
And I had this argument with Konomy because I do think endings matter. So if an ending is really triumphant and everything up to that was miserable, you're telling me it's invalid for me to say this. My story is to me a really good one. I feel really good about it, even though I suffered most of it. I prevailed, and I was like, no, moments, where we start, our peaks and our lows and where it ends matters greatly.
To human beings.
It seems to be based on all studies, that's what we affix. And I think there's also the whole idea of what meaning do we give to certain things? Is what most important? How I'm feeling, which is transient and affected by a thousand things. It's affected by the weather outside, It's affected by how I slept, it's affected by how many carbs. I mean, whatever your thing is right a thousand factors, and yet the things I do in the
world that matter that have meaning. Those are different, right, They're not based on mood, and I'm always, at least for me personally, I've tried to orient myself away from mood being the driving factor in my life, because if you have a mood system like me, that could be rocky territory. Whereas values and what matters, that's a place I can affix my attention to that really steadies things and allows me, to your point, to have a story that feels like it's important.
Yeah, and get your other point about trying to get granular about sort of the questions I ask. I decided early on I would use these terms but not getting this instead of trying to create an objective metric or even think I could get inside somebody else's head if you say that. Almost every day in the last two weeks I felt interested in, like, who am I I'm to get in the business of saying, well, okay, now you know I'm going to get real granded on you.
Now your interest might be at a different sort of objective level than mine. But when I can come to that conclusion, I'm probably the best judge in many respects than anyone else, And so all I can say in some people would say I'm punting. I know, I'm I'm going to allow you to make that assessment. And all I can say is, in the scientific world, when people actually meet these criteria, it is remarkable to see how much better or how much worse they are doing.
Yep.
And I'm telling you it's the sol warse third years now of research, nobody's come up with a better diagnostic set of criteria for good mental health flourishing or languishing that could replace where I just started. It was a starting point. And by the way, what I did was
take depression and literally turn it on its head. When I looked at all the signs and symptoms of well being, so you had to have one out of two antiedonia combined with four out of the seven malfunctioning to meet the criteria for depression every day or almost every day. When I looked at all the well being measures and reduced them down to the fourteen questions in my questionnaire, you have to have one out of the three feeling good almost every day, combined with at least six out
of the eleven functioning well seven out of fourteen. Any combination. The beauty of my diagnosis there's multiple ways people can flourish, there's multiple ways that people can languish.
So listener, consider this. You're halfway through the episode Integration reminder. Remember knowledge is power, but only if combined action and integration. It can be transformative to take a minute to synthesize information rather than just ingesting it in a detached way. So let's collectively take a moment to pause and reflect. What's your one big insight so far and how can you put it into practice in your life. Seriously, just
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When I sit down with people and try to help them, I get the questions out and I put them in front of them, and I say, you don't have to be doing well in all of these things, just seven out of the fourteen and they have to be at least one out of the feeling good and six or more out of the functioning will And by the way, the only thing I will recommend focus on functioning well because you will feel good when you reach that level
of functioning well, and it will be based on something sustainable, yeah, not external to you. You will know that your effort and your accomplishments are creating that feeling good. Because normally, and I studied this in young people, they put feeling good before functioning well. Sure, they value feeling good way over functioning well. And if you could find a way to feel good without functioning well, trust me, most people aren't going to stick with that.
Course well, sure, and generally it's a road that has an end to it, right, meaning there are ways to feel good without functioning well. I mean you and I have explored you know, explore or explored them you know, I mean I took that seeking about as far as you can take it, right, and it didn't end well. So let's talk about what do we mean by functioning well? What are we talking about when we say someone is functioning well?
There were six criteria called psychological well being because they focused primarily on the pronouns me and I. So there's self acceptance, do you like most parts of your personality? There's positive relations which is do you have warm, trusting relationships with other people? There's a sense of personal growth. Are you being challenged to grow and become a better person? There's something called a mastery, which is are you able
to manage the daily responsibilities of your life? Autonomy which is do you feel confident that think and express your own ideas and opinions? And last, but certain and not least purpose in life? Does your life have meaning or direction to it? And then there's five qualities or criteria called social well being that privileged to pronouns we and us. So there's self acceptance. On this self side, there's acceptance
of other people. Are you trusting? Do you view other people with some sense of trust you believe that other people are basically good by nature. There's a thing called coherence. Are you able to make sense of what's going on in the world around you, your society, your community, the world. It's called coherence. I know that.
What's that old saying? It's not a sign of wellness To see a six society is.
To be well adjusted to a six society. Yes, there's a sense of integration. Do you have a sense of belonging? Do you have a community? There's a dimension called social contribution. Do the things you do on a daily basis matter to the world around you, to other people? And last is this sense of social growth. We're members of teams literally and figuratively. Are we being challenged? Do I feel like I as a member of something? Am I being challenged to grow as a better member of something? And
so those are eleven signs of functioning well. And you can have six from either group. You just need six or more at minimum of six almost every day. And I toyed early on in my research you had to have a few from social well beings, some from psychological world. It doesn't matter. Yeah, it really doesn't matter. Having said that, this is an interesting thing. Almost everywhere we've looked in the world, social well being is the hardest thing for
people to achieve almost every day. Yeah, it's really the hardest thing for us social animals, believe it or not.
There are days that my social life is very fulfilling and rich, and there are other days that I sit here and I'm working on a book, so I spend most of my day writing and then you know, I see my partner and we're doing fine, and we have dinner, but there's nothing really that you know, it's all right. Well, you know, like there's just not a lot of social interaction in that day. It's not necessarily a bad day, no, But that's the way I think a lot of our
lives are. All right. Now, let's turn our attention to what are the vitamins of flourishing? Yeah, what are the five sort of things that people can look at doing or investing in that add up to flourishing. And I assume what you're saying is if you integrate these things into your life to some degree, then you're going to answer yes to more of those measures of wealth being that we just talked about.
Yes. This comes from a longitudinal study that followed these folks who were either depressed, not depressed, languishing, or they were flourishing. And what they found was that, regardless of your category, if you were doing more of these five things, now you don't have to do all in one day.
But if you picked one of them, which was either play, learn something new, some form of spiritual or religious activity, helping others, and connecting or socializing, if you did more of one of those things the day prior to the interview, you recorded and had a much better day. And even if you were depressed or languishing, if you continued over time to do more of those five viamins daily or weekly basis, you began to move out of those places. Now,
you didn't jump all the way to flourishing. It takes time, you know, we don't know the exact amount of time. But the good news was you began to move up the continuum closer and closer to flourishing. But here is the thing. If you were flourishing and you stop doing those things, it didn't take long and you began to drift away into languishing. I call that the couch potato effect. Doesn't matter if you're flourishing. You can't just say I'm flourishing. And I'm going to put that in the bank. Now.
I'm going to ignore all those things that got me there because I got something more important, Like I got work, i got careers, I got success to tackle, and I'm going to leave all those things behind because they are a waste of my time. People at my workplace don't really care about those things. Well guess what, Well, if you don't care about them, of course they don't, and
before you know it, you're languishing. So those five things were very clearly addressing a deficiency flourishing, whether you were depressed or languishing. And I think of languishing kind of like the physiological equivalent of anemia. M It feels like that too, because the way I found out that I had Celiac's disease is I became very anemic. I didn't know it. One day I was up there hiking with my wife and I could not make it back to our car. She put me on the side of the road,
went back, got the car, picked me up. I said something wrong, and I went to the doctor and I was very low in iron, and she said, there's only one of two reasons. You're bleeding internally, or you're not taking up iron because you've got celiacs or little intestines has been destroyed. Boom. Yes. And so when I thought about my celiac and what I had done and how it felt languishing. Is a deficiency of those five vitamins?
Yep? Okay, So let's dive into those five vitamins a little bit. I want to go to something you said kind of at the end there, which is like, Okay, I'm doing these things. I decide I'm going to put them in the bank and I'm just going to focus on other things, like work or success or. I think the thing of it, though, is that the wise approach seems to me that you integrate those things into the work that you do, into the success that you seek. They become the way in which you approach things.
Right.
I approach my work from a perspective of what can I learn today here?
Right?
There's opportunities to learn there? Who can I connect with here today? Like I think that we often think that we have to go do these other things in other places and other ways. And where so many people get hung up is there's no time to do that. There's no time if you're going to work, which most people have to do, if you have let's say children, or the flip side of it and soon need care or both. You know where a lot of people find themselves. It's
so hard to get time away to do things. So we have to think, at least for me strategically, about how do I integrate these approaches to things into my day to day life.
Yeah, I love that you bring that up, because I remember I was just marveling at Epicurus, the great philosopher hedonism. I read about him in the book, and he said, what you really need in life are three things. Friends, freedom, and by freedom he meant really autonomy to do as much for yourself as you can and for each other, rather than giving over your life to a boss. And then the last one is examined life. When things go bad,
you need time to reflect and learn. Now everyone was at Epicurius, this is so obvious, why did you put that on the stove up? And he said, well, tell me, if it's so obvious, why don't.
You do these things exactly. Yes, you need con reminders. He said this again and again. Human beings the constant reminders because we are so easily led to believe something else is so much more important.
Yeah, so much more important. And people have said this about my five vitamins, and I think back and I'm like, oh my god. You think this is obvious, then why don't you do it? Why do you think you can only do five minutes of it and it's dumb.
Yeah.
No, you have to do exactly exactly what you said. Create a mindset. There's such beautiful research on mindsets now, about just change the way you think about the things you have to do so you get the things you need from the things you have to do.
I love that, But I have to ask, when you talk about some of this research on mindset, is there any places you could point me.
Well, there's some that I talk about in the book. There's this wonderful young scholar. She's out in Stanford and psychology, Alijah Crumb.
You just freaking me out because I've recorded an interview before this and the woman was a mentor of that woman, and I've never heard her name till now, and now I've heard her twice. No, I'm sorry, she's a mentee of that woman. She's a younger student that has worked with Aliah.
Who is it?
But I've never heard Carrie Leebowitz.
Yeah, that's my student. Oh well, hell yeah, she's in my book as well.
And I've never heard of Aliah Crumb until an hour ago. But all right, Yeah, that is fascinating. Let's come back to what you were just saying, which is, talk to me about this idea of taking what we quote unquote think we have to do, which we actually don't in a lot of cases. Right, there's no law that requires we do certain things. Talk about reclaiming autonomy there and using that to give us some of the things that we need for flourishing, because I think this is a really key point.
Yeah, and oh I just love this study. When Leah was working with Helen Langer, the psychologist Harbor, they were looking for a group of people who do some very physically demanding work yet probably don't view their work as exercise. And they chose a group of people who take care of the hotel rooms right clean, and I'll do all
that work. And it did an intervention and they did an assessment of all the physical activities they did, and then looked at the Surgeon General's report and it was very clear that these mostly women, almost all women, were easily surpassing the Surgeons generals recommended physical activity for every day.
Every day, moving all day, all day.
And yet they do not view their work as exercise. And so Langer and Crumb decided to work with these women and create a mindset intervention with one group that said, look at what you're doing here. You're lifting this and doing this, and they intervene to help them look at not just the work, what the physical activity they were doing, and lo and beho adding the mindset that their work isn't just work, it's also physical activity that's very healthy, change their physical biomarkers.
And health that's crazy.
And it wasn't because they went and got a gym membership or started eating differently. And there's lots of research on this now that if you change your mindset about what you're doing or what you're eating, it doesn't mean ignoring the reality of what you're doing and trying to romanticize. It is simply adding layers of nuance to the reality that most of the time we're doing one thing that has ten or more different elements and we only look at it one way.
Yes, Yes, Carrie and I in our previous conversation talked about this very idea, and I think it's a really important one, which is reality isn't just what actually occurs or what the fact are, nor is reality all what we think about reality. It's a co creation of those things. And to your point, every situation you can look at from multiple angles. And I talk about this a lot.
Listeners to the show will have heard it, this idea of like when I realized at one point, I was like, I found myself saying to myself all the time, I have to do X. The example I often give is I have to take my son to soccer practice. I have to take him here, I have to take him there. And one day I went, wait a second, no, I don't. There's no law in the books that a father has to take his son to soccer practice. That's preposterous. So I'm doing it. Why am I doing it? Oh? I'm
doing it because I care about his well being. I care about his happiness. I think playing team sports helps him develop. Whatever the things are. All of a sudden, the exact same activity has gone from something I have to do to something I'm doing out of a value you that I have. And you know, this is kind of what you're saying. When we take the right mindset about what we're doing, when we take the right mindset about what we do in our lives, our lives can
look very, very different without anything changing. It's not to say that sometimes things don't need to change. They do, of course, and there's a lot of change that can happen by looking at things differently. And I love your five vitamins because they give them a lens we can look at. Can I take what I'm doing? Is there a way that it fits into a learning category or a connecting category, or a transcending category or a helping category, or is there a way to make this thing a
little bit more playful? It gives us sort of almost to use the words or are just using five mindsets exactly that I might slot things into that suddenly give them a value they didn't have before.
Love it, Love it. And this is when I talk to businesses in workplaces, I think of managers is also sort of co creators of this reality? Is well an opportunity, right, you don't have to change much but maybe a little, about the workplace to add these vitamins to people's lives. And it is a win win because, I mean, the evidence was very clear that languishing was costing businesses as much, if not more than depression was.
Yeah, I believe it.
It was costing them a lot. Yeah, mistays of work and presenteeism is why they were there. But they weren't really there.
And there's a cynical view of all that that has taken place a little bit that I understand and I also don't fully agree with. And that cynical view is that companies are investing in wellness only to serve their bottom line. And that may or may not be true. But the fact is, if you can bring wellness into where you spend most of your time as a worker, that benefits you. It doesn't matter what the underlying reason is.
We spend so much time at work, we have to find a way to embody it with meaning and purpose and your five vitamins, right, because most of us don't have an option but to be there or something similar to it, right, We just don't right now. So I think this viewing all of this workplace wellness with cynicism. I understand you know, right, you don't want to use workplace wellness as just a way to convince you to spend more and more of your life at work. That's
that's not it. But it can be used as to say, the time that I spend there, how do I make it more meaningful? And that benefits the employer and it benefits everyone.
Yeah, I played that game politically and scientifically. I mean it's very clear. I could brow out all the statistics of how and scare everyone who's listening to this that languishing is a pretty pump and cause of all cause mortality for females and males. Yeah, it's very clear, and there's good biological reasons for that that I talk about
in the book. It's a very strong risk factor for a variety of mental illnesses depression, anxiety, even PTSD and frontline healthcare workers we found shortly or off during COVID, and I could go on and on. I mean, it's deeply genetic, you know, I mean it's all there. It's like, okay, now, the question is, you know, I'm not going to play this cynical game because I know in order to get places like the National Institute of Health interestedness. You have
to show all those things. If it shortens lives, if it's jamic, it has biological biomarkers, it has neuroscientific substrates. It's all there now. It also addresses the bottom line of a very important one that nobody's paying attention to. Nobody, and we need to raise awareness because there's so many more people languishing who have mental illness, and the sheer amount of people eclipses and causes a lot more problems for the world economically, socially, educationally than mental illness. It
eclipses it. Yeah, and if we want to deal with the burden of mental health problems along with mental illness, we're going to have to deal with this problem languishing. So it's a bottom line issue for public health, for medicine, for workplaces, and it is for you, dear listener, you and your family and yourself. It's a bottom line issue, and we ignore it to our peril because it's a problem.
Given the genetic nature of it. For some of us, languishing is a big step up from the previous genetic generations. I'll take it now. I'm discussing.
It's remarkable about.
That mocking my ancestors. It's a joke.
You know that genes that we inherit for flourishing or languishing operate more or less independently from the genes we inherit for mental illness. And again we're back to the wolf you feed because it's about epigenetics and environments, and we're feeding that wolf of illness, and we're trying to lower genetic risk when we're ignoring what resides over here in the parable, which is the genetic potential. We're not
even there. But my point is we've shown this in our research that they operate independently, and the one that wins is the one that gets attention and gets fed, and we're not paying an attent at all to genetic potential for flourishing. Yeah, and that's my dream before I pass on to some other spiritual realm, that I see somebody who actually sees this from what it is. It's like, why aren't you feeding that wolf.
Let's wrap up here because we're about the hour mark. I want to end on what you just said, which is where you've tied things back to the pair. I'd love if you could just take us out with what is one very basic way that an individual listening to this show could feed the wolf of flourishing. Let's end there, and then in the post show conversation, I want to explore a little bit of what you said about what
we're not paying attention to. I think that's interesting, But I want to leave listeners with something that they can take away as a way of feeding the wolf of flourishing.
Yeah, languishing is a normal response that can become problematic if we don't listen to it, because I call it the existential alarm clock. When you start to feel that creeping in, that emptiness, that numbness, that feeling of starting to die inside, it's telling you you've left behind something that's very good for you, that you need, that was
feeding your flourishing. Now sometimes we have to do that, but don't ignore it for too long, because it is an alarm clock that if you keep hitting the existential snooze button, you will languish in a way that's pathological. It's very dangerous. So listen to it because it's telling you you are leaving behind the very things like that go into the vitamins and also go into the ingredients of flourish that feed your spirit wonderful.
Thank you so much, Corey. Like I said, you and I are going to talk in the post show conversation and listeners if you'd like access to that where we're probably going to nerd out on some things. If you like that part of what we do, become a member of our community at when Youfeed dot net slash join and you can hear Corey and I nerd out on that stuff. And thanks Corey, I appreciate it.
Thanks for having you.
It's been a pleasure.
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