Languishing vs. Flourishing: How to Feel Alive Again with Corey Keyes

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
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.

Speaker 2 (00:20):
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

(00:42):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:05):
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,

(01:27):
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

(01:48):
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.

Speaker 1 (02:00):
Greetings Eric.

Speaker 3 (02:01):
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

(02:25):
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

(02:48):
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

(03:08):
that you do.

Speaker 1 (03:09):
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

(03:33):
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

(03:54):
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.

Speaker 3 (04:16):
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

(04:37):
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

(04:58):
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.

(05:20):
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

(05:42):
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,

(06:02):
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

(06:24):
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.

Speaker 1 (06:36):
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

(06:56):
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

(07:17):
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

(07:38):
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.

Speaker 4 (08:01):
It what you want.

Speaker 1 (08:02):
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

(08:25):
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

(08:47):
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

(09:09):
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.

Speaker 3 (09:25):
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,

(09:47):
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.

Speaker 1 (10:08):
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,

(10:33):
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.

(10:53):
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

(11:15):
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

(11:36):
call flourishing.

Speaker 3 (11:38):
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,

(11:59):
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

(12:20):
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.

(12:43):
I almost wish that the clarity of addiction was was
able to bring it to other areas.

Speaker 1 (12:48):
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

(13:11):
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.

Speaker 4 (13:32):
Can do it for us.

Speaker 1 (13:33):
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,

(13:54):
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.

Speaker 3 (14:05):
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

(14:27):
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

(14:49):
support group gain much traction in this area. And I
don't fully understand why.

Speaker 1 (14:54):
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

(15:16):
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,

(15:41):
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

(16:04):
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.

Speaker 3 (16:15):
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.

Speaker 1 (16:34):
Me too right, me too right?

Speaker 3 (16:36):
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

(16:58):
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

(17:19):
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,

(17:41):
at least for a lot of people towards health.

Speaker 1 (17:43):
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

(18:05):
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

(18:28):
could if we really put ourselves to the task.

Speaker 3 (18:31):
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

(18:53):
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

(19:15):
other things that it sort of looks.

Speaker 1 (19:16):
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.

(19:38):
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

(20:01):
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,

(20:24):
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

(20:45):
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

(21:08):
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

(21:31):
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

(21:54):
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.

Speaker 3 (22:29):
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

(22:49):
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

(23:11):
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

(23:32):
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

(23:53):
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

(24:14):
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

(24:35):
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

(24:59):
it when it comes to trying to sort things out
in my own head. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (25:04):
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

(25:25):
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

(25:48):
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,

(26:09):
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

(26:33):
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,

(26:53):
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,

(27:14):
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,

(27:36):
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.

(27:58):
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.

Speaker 4 (28:17):
Yeah, yeah, Harry.

Speaker 1 (28:19):
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.

Speaker 3 (28:34):
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

(28:56):
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

(29:19):
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

(29:42):
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

(30:06):
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.

(30:29):
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

(30:50):
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.

Speaker 1 (31:04):
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.

Speaker 4 (31:21):
For you.

Speaker 1 (31:21):
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.

Speaker 3 (31:41):
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.

Speaker 1 (31:52):
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.

Speaker 3 (32:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (32:02):
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.

Speaker 3 (32:16):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (32:16):
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

(32:36):
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.

Speaker 4 (32:48):
To human beings.

Speaker 3 (32:49):
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

(33:11):
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

(33:33):
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.

Speaker 1 (33:48):
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

(34:10):
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

(34:30):
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

(34:52):
much better or how much worse they are doing.

Speaker 3 (34:56):
Yep.

Speaker 1 (34:57):
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

(35:18):
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

(35:38):
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.

Speaker 3 (35:53):
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

(36:14):
you put it into practice in your life. Seriously, just
take a second, pause the audio and reflect. It can
be so powerful to have these reminders to stop and
be present, can't it. If you want to keep this
momentum going that you built with this little exercise, i'd
encourage you to get on our Good Wolf Reminders SMS list.
I'll shoot you two texts a week with insightful little

(36:35):
prompts and wisdom from podcast guests. They're a nice little
nudge to stop and be present in your life, and
they're a helpful way to not get lost in the
busyness and forget what is important. You can join at
oneufeed dot net slash sms and if you don't like them,
you can get off a list really easily. So far,
there are over one and seventy two others from the

(36:57):
one you feed community on the list, and we'd love
to welcome you as well, So head on over to
oneufeed dot net slash SMS and let's feed our good
wolves together.

Speaker 1 (37:08):
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

(37:28):
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

(37:50):
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.

Speaker 3 (38:02):
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?

(38:25):
What are we talking about when we say someone is
functioning well?

Speaker 1 (38:28):
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?

(38:51):
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.

(39:14):
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.

(39:35):
It's called coherence. I know that.

Speaker 3 (39:39):
What's that old saying? It's not a sign of wellness
To see a six society is.

Speaker 1 (39:44):
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

(40:08):
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

(40:29):
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.

Speaker 3 (41:10):
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,

(41:31):
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

(41:52):
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.

Speaker 1 (42:01):
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,

(42:25):
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

(42:47):
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

(43:07):
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

(43:29):
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

(43:54):
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

(44:17):
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

(44:38):
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?

Speaker 3 (44:54):
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

(45:20):
work that you do, into the success that you seek.
They become the way in which you approach things.

Speaker 2 (45:29):
Right.

Speaker 3 (45:29):
I approach my work from a perspective of what can
I learn today here?

Speaker 2 (45:35):
Right?

Speaker 3 (45:35):
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

(45:55):
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.

Speaker 1 (46:16):
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,

(46:37):
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.

Speaker 4 (46:56):
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.

Speaker 1 (47:11):
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.

Speaker 3 (47:25):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (47:26):
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.

Speaker 3 (47:45):
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.

Speaker 1 (47:51):
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.

Speaker 3 (47:59):
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.

Speaker 1 (48:15):
Who is it?

Speaker 3 (48:16):
But I've never heard Carrie Leebowitz.

Speaker 1 (48:18):
Yeah, that's my student. Oh well, hell yeah, she's in
my book as well.

Speaker 3 (48:22):
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

(48:48):
using that to give us some of the things that
we need for flourishing, because I think this is a
really key point.

Speaker 1 (48:53):
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

(49:15):
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.

Speaker 3 (49:36):
Every day, moving all day, all day.

Speaker 1 (49:38):
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,

(49:59):
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.

Speaker 3 (50:14):
And health that's crazy.

Speaker 1 (50:16):
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

(50:38):
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.

Speaker 3 (50:46):
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

(51:09):
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.

(51:30):
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,

(51:51):
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

(52:14):
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,

(52:37):
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.

Speaker 1 (52:51):
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

(53:14):
evidence was very clear that languishing was costing businesses as much,
if not more than depression was.

Speaker 3 (53:21):
Yeah, I believe it.

Speaker 1 (53:22):
It was costing them a lot. Yeah, mistays of work
and presenteeism is why they were there. But they weren't
really there.

Speaker 3 (53:30):
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

(53:51):
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

(54:12):
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

(54:36):
benefits everyone.

Speaker 1 (54:37):
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

(54:59):
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,

(55:20):
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

(55:45):
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

(56:09):
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,

(56:32):
and we ignore it to our peril because it's a problem.

Speaker 3 (56:37):
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.

Speaker 1 (56:47):
It's remarkable about.

Speaker 3 (56:48):
That mocking my ancestors. It's a joke.

Speaker 1 (56:51):
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

(57:11):
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,

(57:33):
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.

Speaker 3 (57:51):
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,

(58:11):
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.

Speaker 1 (58:24):
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

(58:48):
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

(59:10):
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.

Speaker 3 (59:23):
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.

Speaker 1 (59:43):
Thanks for having you.

Speaker 3 (59:43):
It's been a pleasure.

Speaker 2 (01:00:01):
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Speaker 3 (01:00:17):
Now.

Speaker 2 (01:00:17):
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Eric Zimmer

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