Good Life Project

Bizarre fact, if you tell people you’re genuinely happy being single, they don’t believe you. You, in fact, may be among the doubters when it comes to your single-at-heart friends. 

Bella DePaulo has spent more than three decades studying what happens when someone is genuinely, unapologetically happy being single, and one thing keeps showing up in her data. People don't believe them. In studies where participant...

Allison Aubrey walked into a longevity lab expecting a great story. She walked out believing she was failing at key parts of her own life. After 25 years as one of NPR's most trusted health and science reporters, Aubrey agreed to a battery of tests meant to measure her biological age, and the results rattled her enough to send her on a curiosity tour, looking for answers that had nothing to do with biology. 

What she found ...

Angela Duckworth on why grit is only half the story. Acclaimed researcher Professor Angela Duckworth returns to unpack a bigger idea behind grit: your environment matters as much, if not more, than your mindset. Jonathan and Angela Duckworth explore how situation, peers, mentors, and culture shape the thoughts you have, the effort you can sustain, and the kind of person you become.

They also dig into the practical question of ch...

Most of us think good decisions happen in the moment. Shane Parrish says they’re already decided before you sit down. And most of them end up being bad, because you waited too long to make them good.

Shane Parrish spent years inside Canadian intelligence, making real-time decisions where the stakes were other people's lives, long before he founded Farnam Street and The Knowledge Project podcast. He's the author of Clear Th...

Priya Parker comes back to argue that the fights you're avoiding aren't threatening your closest relationships; they're the only thing that can save them.

Priya Parker is a facilitator and strategic advisor who has spent two decades helping churches, companies, and families fight better, not less. She's the acclaimed author of The Art of Gathering and her new book, The Art of Fighting, and she's spent her career inside the rooms...

Most women don't hear about perimenopause until they're already deep into it, sometimes a decade in. This week, guest host Karen Walrond talks with OB/GYN and Generation M author Dr. Jessica Shepherd about the actual, gradual shape of that transition, the real math behind hormone therapy decisions, and why nearly 40% of a woman's life happens after menopause even begins. It's less a symptom checklist than a new starting point for t...

Your brain does not have to decline with age. Recent research reveals that for most people, staving off cognitive decline or dementia is more about lifestyle, especially in your 30s to 50s, than age or genetics. And, amazingly, retirement might be the single biggest danger zone for your brain health.

Neuroscientist Dr. Tommy Wood has spent his career studying what actually predicts a declining brain, and the answer has almost no...

Every night, while you're asleep, your brain runs a cleaning cycle that clears out the kind of toxic buildup linked to Alzheimer's and dementia. And, with age, most of us sleep less. We are shortchanging the benefits without ever realizing how much control we actually have over sleeping longer, and better.

Dr. Rebecca Robbins is an Assistant Professor in Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School and an Associate Sleep Scientist a...

You can have a genuinely excellent self-care practice, the meditation, the training, the tracked sleep, the nutrition, and still be using every bit of it to avoid the one question that actually needed asking.

In this episode, I turn the mic on myself. After 14 years and thousands of conversations about what it takes to live well, I trace the year my own "robust" wellness practice, meditation, training, nutrition, connection, eve...

We've been calling it a loneliness epidemic and treating it like a mental health problem. NYU developmental psychologist Niobe Way says that's the wrong diagnosis, and she has almost 40 years of data on teenage boys to make her case.

Niobe Way has spent nearly four decades running longitudinal studies with teenagers, tracking the same kids from middle school into adulthood. Her research on boys, friendship, and masculinity has m...

What if the kindest thing someone told you about your pain was that it didn't have to mean anything?

Marisa Renee Lee has spent her career inside other people's grief and her own. She's the bestselling author of Grief Is Love, a former deputy director in the Obama White House, and now CEO of Beacon Advisors. Her new book, Waiting for Dawn, comes out of her own experience with chronic illness, and it argues against nearly every w...

For decades, migraine was explained to patients as a blood vessel problem: swelling, throbbing, treat it by shrinking things back down. That explanation is mostly a myth, and it may be part of why so many older treatments never worked.

Dr. Fred Cohen is medical director of Headache Intervention and an assistant professor of medicine and neurology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. He's one of the few headache specia...

You know that feeling, like you’re forever running behind in work and life? That you’ll never finally be “there,” or be able to relax and enjoy things. Like the days are just collapsing into each other? Welcome to the wacky world of time anxiety. You are not alone. 

Chris Guillebeau has spent fifteen years writing about the questions that keep smart, capable people stuck. He is back on the show to ta...

Most of us think the biggest decision about a room is whether it's functional. Leidy Klotz thinks that's the wrong question, and the right one changes how a desk, a kitchen, or an entire return-to-office policy actually lands on the person living inside it.

Leidy Klotz is a behavioral scientist and engineering professor at the University of Virginia who studies how and why humans design. His research has appeared in Nature and S...

By the age of 7, most of us have absorbed the rules that run our financial lives…forever. And almost none of us checked to see if they were true. Not the numbers. The rules. The slogans we heard around the kitchen table about what money means, who deserves it, and what it says about us if we don't have enough of it.

Leisa Peterson spent three decades inside the financial services industry before a near-fatal event forced ...

Your body already knows you're stressed before your brain finishes the thought. That tightness in your chest before a hard conversation. The way your stomach drops before you walk into a room full of people. Logic doesn't reach it. Telling yourself you're fine doesn't touch it. What if you could send a direct signal to your nervous system that you're safe, and actually change the chemistry?

Jessica Ortner is a New York Times bes...

Share your midlife reinvention story with us HERE.

You have a plan for how to succeed in the second half of the year, how to “get back on track.” And a plan, it turns out, is the most sophisticated way to actually stand still while feeling like you're moving.

This is Part 2 of a special two-part midyear series on Good Life Project. In Part 1, Jonathan led a different kind of honest check-in, setting down the score...

You can hit every goal you set in January and still be running on empty in the parts of your life the list never thought to measure. That's not a failure story. That's a design flaw in the instrument most of us reach for at the midpoint of the year.

Jonathan Fields has spent 14 years exploring what it takes to build a life that genuinely feels like yours. In this solo episode, he gets personal about a stretch that looked, by eve...

Between 10 and 15 percent of mothers and 1 in 4 fathers are currently estranged from a child. If those numbers feel shocking, the harder truth might be this: most of the moves parents instinctively make once estrangement begins are the exact moves that keep the door shut.

Dr. Joshua Coleman has spent more than four decades as a practicing psychologist and is a Senior Fellow with the Council on Contemporary Families. His own daug...