The One You Feed - Languishing vs. Flourishing: How to Feel Alive Again with Corey Keyes

Episode Date: February 11, 2025

In this episode, Corey Keyes explores the concept of languishing vs. flourishing and how to feel alive again He delves into the often-overlooked emotional state that exists between mental illness and thriving and discusses how many of us can feel worn down by life and stuck in a gray zone of stagnation. Corey shares his insights on the importance of mindset and how changing the way we think about our daily tasks can lead us to a more fulfilling life. The discussion touches on the critical aspects of purpose, connection, and vitality, offering listeners strategies to move from languishing to flourishing. Key Takeaways: 00:05:29 – The Role of Positive Psychology and Mental Health 00:06:46 – Corey’s Background and the Successful Aging Research Network 00:08:08 – The Purpose of Positive Psychology and Addressing Languishing 00:09:25 – Flourishing Despite Mental Health Conditions 00:10:08 – The Relationship Between Flourishing and Mental Illness 00:12:49 – The Challenge of Defining Recovery in Addiction and Mental Health 00:14:02 – The Lack of Peer Support Groups for Depression 00:15:05 – The Role of Experts in Mental Health 00:16:15 – The Difference Between Sharing with Experts and Peer Support 00:17:07 – The Importance of Having a Clear Program in Support Groups 00:18:04 – The Need for a New Approach to Mental Health Support Programs 00:19:01 – Defining Languishing and Its Distinction from Depression 00:20:36 – The Overlap Between Languishing and Depression 00:22:29 – The Impact of Languishing on Mental Health 00:23:39 – Personal Reflections on Eliminating Suffering and Seeking Joy 00:25:04 – The Challenge of Recalibrating After Addiction 00:25:58 – The Importance of Functioning Well 00:28:05 – The Nuances of Feeling Good vs. Functioning Well 00:30:09 – The Difference Between Satisfaction and Momentary Feelings 00:31:04 – The Role of Storytelling in Perceived Well-Being 00:32:49 – The Importance of Meaning and Values Over Mood 00:33:59 – Allowing Self-Assessment in Measuring Well-Being 00:35:53 – The Criteria for Flourishing and Languishing 00:37:08 – Encouraging Reflection and Integration for Listeners 00:38:18 – The Importance of Functioning Well in Achieving Flourishing 00:40:28 – The Difficulty of Achieving Social Well-Being 00:41:10 – The Five Vitamins of Flourishing 00:42:01 – Integrating Flourishing Activities into Daily Life 00:45:05 – The Importance of Mindset in Achieving Flourishing 00:47:09 – Research on Mindsets and Practical Applications For full show notes, click here! Connect with the show: Follow us on YouTube: @TheOneYouFeedPod Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify Follow us on Instagram See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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. When I saw the title of today's guest's 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 as 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. was 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. $1.4 billion in NFL quarterback contracts. The untold stories behind the biggest deals in football history.

I'm A.J. Stevens, vice president of client strategy at Athletes First, introducing the Athletes First Family Podcast, the quarterback series. My co-host Brian Murphy, Athletes First CEO, and I are sitting down with the agents who have negotiated contracts for Justin Herbert, Deshaun Watson, Dak Prescott, Tua Tunga-Vaioloa, and Jordan Love. Listen to Athlete's First Family podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome. My name is Paola Pedroza, a medium and the host of the Ghost Therapy Podcast, where it's

not just about connecting with deceased loved ones. It's about learning through them and their new perspective. I think God sent me this gift so I can show it to the world. And most of all, I help people every single day. Listen to the Ghost Therapy Podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You are cordially invited to the hottest party in professional sports. I'm Tisha Allen, former golf professional and the host of Welcome to the Party, your newest obsession about the wonderful world that is women's golf. Featuring interviews with top players on tour, tips to help improve your swing, and the craziest

stories to come out of your friendly neighborhood country club. Welcome to the Party with Tisha Olin is an iHeart Woman's Sports Production in partnership with Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment. Listen to Welcome to the Party. That's P-A-R-T-E-E on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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

or 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 is 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, 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

with 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 expectancy and putting death at bay. And yet we're struggling to add healthy longevity to our lives. 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 that are 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 Good Wolf 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.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 oneufeed.net slash SMS and now back to the episode. I'm glad you used 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 on a broader sense. Certainly for most of psychology's history, it was focused on mental illness, right? It was solving neuroses 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 focusing 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 were aging what we were calling successfully. Now that's a bit of a loaded word and people are 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 2025 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 wanted to 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 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 to be happy. Why? Why? What are you gonna 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 addition of these positive things. 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 goes, I put it away in the closet, so to speak. It's there. Every time I wake up and I go into my closet, 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 16, coming up maybe on 17 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 closet. It hasn't been pulled out in years, but I've had experiences in the past when I say this go around 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. You 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, I 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 of, for me, alcoholism is that in one sense, we all think about, 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 that 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. Yeah, 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 Yeah, and let's start 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 12-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, the Bill and Bob, that there's nothing I can do for you. Yeah. 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 there certainly wasn't the story that I know

when Bill and Bob were starting. 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. 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.

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, your psychologist or your therapist or whatever isn't then turning around and going, me too. Me too. Me too, right? Oh, I've been there.

Yeah. I mean, God, just last week, I also think that what 12-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? 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 12 Steps the best way? Probably not. But you know what? It's a way, right? It's a path. 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 balk sometimes when I hear people say, well, let's take the AA-12-step kind of approach and apply it to mental illness. I think that itself, Eric, would be a little wrong-headed because I love the steps because they're so closely allied with the fact that we've reached a level of demoralization and humiliation and a loss of a sense of life that we have to rebuild that are baked into those steps. We have to redeem ourselves, reclaim ourselves, and mental illness has enough of the morality issues hanging over to stigmatize it.

So we need to really think anew. 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 12 steps, I would argue, even for a lot of people who have addiction issues may not even be the right path, right? But 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 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 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 first 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 symptoms. If we were to look at the psychiatric manual,

we would see the presence of negative emotions and 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 symptom. 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 into depression, and not have any of the positive things either. And that's an interesting category because that's why I've used the phrase and Adam 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 for diagnosable a few, but they don't meet the criteria for 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 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 depressed 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 there 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. Ever wonder what it's like to be on the phone with an NFL general manager as you finalize the biggest contract in NFL history? I'm AJ Stevens, vice president of client strategy at Athletes First, where we've negotiated $1.4 billion in current NFL quarterback contracts. Introducing the Athletes First family podcast, the quarterback series, along

with my co host Brian Murphy, Athletes First CEO, we're pulling back the curtain on how these historic deals come together. You'll hear directly from the agents who shaped the NFL's financial landscape, the ones who negotiated Justin Herbert's extension and Deshaun Watson's fully guaranteed contract that sent shockwaves through the league. This isn't just about the numbers, though. It's about the untold stories behind these massive negotiations and the relationships the NFL superstars like Dak Prescott, Tua Tungal-Vallilola, and Jordan Love have with their agents at Athletes First. For the first time ever, the agents who orchestrate these deals are sharing the details of the

negotiations and everything that led up to their clients signing on the dotted line. Listen to the Athletes First Family podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Something about Mary Poppins? Something about Mary Poppins. Exactly. Oh man, This is fun. I'm AJ Jacobs, and I am an author and a journalist,

and I tend to get obsessed with stuff. And my current obsession is puzzles. And that has given birth to my podcast, The Puzzler. Dressing. Dressing. French dressing. Exactly. Ha ha ha! Oh, French dressing. Exactly!

Oh, that's good. Now, you can get your Daily Puzzle Nuggets delivered straight to your ears. I thought to myself, I bet I know what this is. And now I definitely know what this is. This is so weird. This is fun. Let's try this one. Our brand new season features special guests like Chuck Bryant, Mayim Bialik, Julie Bowen,

Sam Sanders, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and lots more. Listen to the Puzzler every day on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. That's awful, and I should have seen it coming. What if you ask two different people the same set of questions? Even if the questions are the same, our experiences can lead us to drastically different answers. I'm Minnie Driver, and I set out to explore this idea in my podcast, Minnie Questions. Over the years, we have had some incredible guests. People like Courtney Cox, star of the infinitely beloved sitcom Friends, EGOT winner Viola Davis,

and former Prime Minister of the UK, Tony Blair. And now, Mini Questions is returning for another season. We've asked an entirely new set of guests our seven questions, including Jane Lynch, Delaney Rowe, and Cord Jefferson. Each episode is a new person's story with new lessons, new memories, and new connections to show us how we're both similar and unique. Listen to mini questions on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Seven questions, limitless answers. 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'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 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 23-year-old me in my brain, he would think he was enlightened. The difference is so stark. But the 53-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, when 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 and that's a 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. Yeah. 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 12 to 13% 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, 13% of them had one of three mental disorders in the past two weeks compared to less

than 4% 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 11 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 an 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 25% of the US college student population. They feel good about a life where they're not functioning well. Their life doesn't have purpose, belonging, contribution, growth, and all that. 21% of them met the criteria in the past two weeks for depression, anxiety, or a panic attack compared to less than 4%. But it gets worse the more severe your 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 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. Growth is not everything it's cracked up to be. It doesn't create happiness. So those 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 languishing, 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?

Right? 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, with 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 good. I would fall into this category. I'm satisfied. My life is great. 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. That would be my reaction. Eh, you know. Eh, eh. And this gets to also thinking about, 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. Yeah. 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 around and around with psychologists about this. Daniel Kahneman 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 10 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? In 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 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.

Whether we have peak moments or valleys, I think the way stories end matter. I had this argument with Connelly because I do think endings matter. If an ending is really triumphant and everything up to that was miserable, you're telling me it's invalid for me to say that 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 then I think there's also the whole idea of what meaning do we give to certain things? Is what's 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 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? 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 to get to 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 get in the business 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 gonna get real candid

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, and some people would say I'm punting, I know, 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. And I'm telling you, it's over 30 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. That 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 anhedonia 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 14 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 11

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 your halfway through the episode integration reminder. Remember, knowledge is power, but only if combined with 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 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 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 OneYouFeed.net slash SMS and if you don't like them, you can get off the list really easily. So far there are over 1172 others

from the One You Feed community on the list and we'd love to welcome you as well. So head on over to OneYouFeed.net slash SMS and let's feed our good wolves together. 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 14 and they have to be at least one out of the feeling good and six or more out of the functioning well. 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, 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 are 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, we've 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 of 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 the mastery, which is are you able to manage the daily

responsibilities of your life? Autonomy, which is do you feel confident to think and express your own ideas and opinions? And last but certainly 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 privilege the pronouns we and us. So there's self-acceptance on this self-site. There's acceptance of other people. Are you trusting? Do you view other people with some sense of trust? Do you believe that other people are basically good by nature? There's this 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 sick society is... To be well adjusted to a Sikh 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 the 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 11 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-being, some from psychological well-being. It doesn't matter. It really doesn't matter. Having said that, and 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 people to achieve. Almost every day. Yeah, it's really the hardest thing for us social animals. Believe it or not. Ever wonder what it's like to be on the phone with an NFL general manager as you finalize the biggest contract in NFL history?

I'm AJ Stevens, vice president of client strategy at Athletes First, where we've negotiated $1.4 billion in current NFL quarterback contracts. Introducing the Athletes First Family podcast, the quarterback series. Along with my co-host Brian Murphy, Athletes First CEO, we're pulling back the curtain on how these historic deals come together. You'll hear directly from the agents

who shaped the NFL's financial landscape. The ones who negotiated Justin Herbert's extension and Deshaun Watson's fully guaranteed contract that sent shockwaves through the league. This isn't just about the numbers though, it's about the untold stories behind these massive negotiations and the relationships the NFL superstars like Dak Prescott, Tua Tungo Vallilola and Jordan Love have with their agents at Athletes First. For the first time ever, the agents who orchestrate these deals are sharing the details of the negotiations and

everything that led up to their clients signing on the dotted line. Listen to the Athlete's First Family podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Something about Mary Poppins? Something about Mary Poppins. Exactly. Oh man, this is fun. I'm AJ Jacobs and I am an author and a journalist and I tend to get obsessed with stuff.

And my current obsession is puzzles. And that has given birth to my podcast, The Puzzler. Dressing. Dressing. Oh, French dressing. Exactly. Oh, that was good. Now you can get your daily puzzle nuggets delivered straight to your ears.

I thought to myself, I bet I know what this is. And now I definitely know what this is. This is so weird. This is fun. Let's try this one. Our brand new season features special guests like Chuck Bryant, Mya Bialik, Julie Bowen, Sam Sanders, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and lots more. Listen to The Puzzler every day on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

That's awful, and I should have seen it coming. What if you ask two different people the same set of questions? Even if the questions are the same, our experiences can lead us to drastically different answers. I'm Minnie Driver, and I set out to explore this idea in my podcast, Minnie Questions. Over the years, we have had some incredible guests. People like Courtney Cox, star of the infinitely beloved sitcom Friends, EGOT winner Viola Davis,

and former Prime Minister of the UK Tony Blair. And now, Mini Questions is returning for another season. We've asked an entirely new set of guests our seven questions, including Jane Lynch, Delaney Rowe and Cord Jefferson. Each episode is a new person's story with new lessons, new memories, and new connections to show us how we're both similar and unique. Listen to mini questions on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Seven questions, limitless answers. 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 I see my partner and we're doing fine and we have dinner, but there's nothing really that, you know, it's like, there's just not a lot of social interaction in that day. It's not necessarily a bad day, 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 gonna answer yes to more of those measures of wellbeing 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 them 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 vitamins, 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. 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 stopped 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 there because I got something more important. Like I got work, I got careers, I got success to tackle, and I'm gonna leave all those things behind because they're

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. Before you know it, you're languishing. So those five things were very clearly addressing a deficiency in flourishing, whether you were depressed or languishing. And I think of languishing kind of like the physiological equivalent of anemia. It feels like that too, because the way I found out that I had celiac disease is I became very anemia. It feels like that too because the way I found out that I had celiac 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's wrong and I went to the doctor and I was very low in iron. 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, your little intestines has been destroyed. Boom. Yes. And so when I thought about my celiacs 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, right? Like I think that we often think that we have to go do these other things and other places in 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, parents who 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 write 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 like, Epicurus, this is so obvious. Why did you put that on the stove? And he said, well, tell me if it's so obvious, why don't you do these things? Exactly, yes.

You need constant reminders. He said this again and again, human beings need constant reminders because we are so easily led to believe something else is so much more important. Yeah. So much more important. And. 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 several that I talk about in the book. There's this wonderful young scholar. She's out in Stanford in psychology, Aliyah Crumb. You just freaked 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 Aliyah. Who is it? But I've never heard Carrie Leibowitz. Yeah, that's my student. Oh, well, hell. Yeah. She's in my book as well. I've never heard of Aliyah Crumb until

an hour ago. Yeah. 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 Ellen Langer, the psychologist at Harvard, 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? To clean and all do all that work and 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 Surgeon General's recommended physical activity for every day. They're moving all day. All day. And yet they do not view their work as exercise. And so Langer and Crum 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 intervened to help them look at not just the work, but the physical activity they were doing. And lo and behold, adding a 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 10 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 facts 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 of 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 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? Gives us sort of almost, to use the words you're just using, five mindsets 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 and workplaces, I think, of managers as also sort of co-creators of this reality as 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 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, miss days of work and presenteeism is right 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 draw out all the statistics of how and scare everyone who's listening to this that languishing is a pretty potent 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 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 interested in this, you have to show all those things.

If it shortens lives, if it's genetic, 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. 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. No, I'm just kidding. What's remarkable about that, Eric, is- I'm mocking my ancestors. It's a joke. You know, the 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 attention at all to genetic potential for flourishing. Yeah. 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 tied things back to the parable. 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 speeding 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, that's very dangerous. So listen to it because it's telling you. You are leaving behind the very things that go into the vitamins and also go into the ingredients of flourishing that feed your spirit. Wonderful.

Thank you so much, Corey. Like I said, you and I are gonna talk in the post-show conversation. And listeners, if you'd like access to that, where we're probably gonna nerd out on some things. If you like that part of what we do, become a member of our community at whenufeed.net slash join and you can hear Cory and I nerd out on that stuff. And thanks Cory, I appreciate it.

Thanks for having me. It's been a pleasure. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. We are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted.

To learn more, make a donation at any level, and become a member of the One You Feed community, go to onewfeed.net slash join. The One You Feed community, go to oneufeed.net slash join. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show. $1.4 billion in NFL quarterback contracts, the untold stories behind the biggest deals in football history. I'm A.J. Stevens, Vice President of Client Strategy at Athletes First, introducing the Athletes First Family Podcast, the quarterback series.

My cohost, Brian Murphy, Athletes First CEO, and I are sitting down with the agents who have negotiated contracts for Justin Herbert, Deshaun Watson, Dak Prescott, Tua Tunga-Vaioloa, and Jordan Love. Listen to Athletes First Family Podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome.

My name is Paola Pedroza, a medium and the host of the Ghost Therapy Podcast, where it's not just about connecting with deceased loved ones. It's about learning through them and their new perspective. I think God sent me this gift so I can show it to the world. And most of all, I help people every single day. Listen to the Ghost Therapy podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

You are cordially invited to the hottest party in professional sports. I'm Tisha Olin, former golf professional and the host of Welcome to the Party, your newest obsession about the wonderful world that is women's golf. Featuring interviews with top players on tour, tips to help improve your swing, and the craziest stories to come out of your friendly neighborhood country club. Welcome to the Party with Tisha Allen is an I Heart Women's Sports production in partnership with Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment.

Listen to Welcome to the Party. That's P-A-R-T-E-E on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.