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

In this episode, I turn the mic on myself. After 14 years and thousands of conversations about what it takes to live well, I trace the year my own "robust" wellness practice, meditation, training, nutrition, connection, everything, ended in a stress-induced medical diagnosis at the exact moment I'd have called myself the most dialed-in version of my life. 

Turns out, you cannot self-care your way out of a fundamental misalignment in a core area of your life. 

So, today, we’re exploring:

• The real distinction between self-care that restores you and self-care that just makes a misaligned life more bearable, or worse, hides what actually needs your true attention.
• Three 90-second tests, duration, imagination, intensity, that tell you honestly which one you're running
• The five places structural misalignment hides in midlife, including the "cumulative weight" version almost nobody names
• Why subtraction, not another practice, is usually the actual fix
• A six-move menu for making one concrete structural change in the next 30 days

If your practice has been working harder for smaller returns lately, this conversation will tell you whether that's a regulation problem or a fit problem, and what to do about either one.

Episode Transcript

If you LOVED this episode, you can find the 1-page worksheet HERE.

Mentioned in this episode: How to Finally Have the Talk You’ve Been Avoiding.

Next week, next week we're sitting down with Dr. Rebecca Robbins to talk about why the sleep advice most of us are following was built for a body and a schedule most of us don't actually have anymore. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss any upcoming episodes!

Check out our sponsors and resources: Visit Our Sponsor Page

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

Niobe Way has spent nearly four decades running longitudinal studies with teenagers, tracking the same kids from middle school into adulthood. Her research on boys, friendship, and masculinity has made her one of the go-to voices on loneliness, connection, and what's actually driving rising rates of depression, anxiety, and violence among young men, along with similar struggles with girls. And, these all tend to follow us well into adulthood. Her latest book is Rebels with a Cause: Reimagining Boys, Ourselves, and Our Culture.

In this conversation, you'll explore:

• Why mental health is a symptom, not the root problem, and what Way calls "social health" instead
• The moment, around age 15, when boys start hiding their feelings in public
• Why boys learn to sacrifice the relationship to protect themselves, and girls learn to sacrifice themselves to protect the relationship
• The dinner-table questions that build real closeness instead of shutting kids down
• A simple, almost embarrassingly doable practice Way uses with total strangers to rebuild a sense of belonging

Whether you're raising a teenager, trying to figure out why your own friendships have gone thin, or just wondering why everyone feels so alone lately, this conversation reframes the whole question.

You can find Niobe at: Website | Instagram | Episode Transcript

Next week, it's just me, flying solo, to talk about the self-care trap: the difference between practices that actually help you thrive, and ones that just help you tolerate a life that no longer fits. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss any upcoming episodes!

Check out our sponsors and resources: Visit Our Sponsor Page

Share your midlife reinvention story with us HERE.

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

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

In this conversation, you'll explore:

• Why Marisa refuses to promise anyone that their suffering serves a purpose, even her own family's
• "Gray grief": a name for the grief that has no end date, no diagnosis, and no cultural script
• The difference between identity (what you built) and essence (what's still there when it's gone)
• Why she calls hope a discipline, not a feeling, and what that looks like on the worst days
• How her family held onto hope through her aunt's most devastating loss, and what happened after

If you've ever felt ashamed for not finding the silver lining in something genuinely hard, this conversation is your permission to put that pressure down.

You can find Marisa at: Website | Instagram | Holding Both Substack | Episode Transcript

Next week, we're sitting down with Dr. Niobe Way to talk about why so many of us feel lonelier than ever even when we're surrounded by people, and what decades of research say is actually driving it. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don’t miss any upcoming episodes!

Check out our sponsors and resources: Visit Our Sponsor Page

Share your midlife reinvention story with us HERE.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

Dr. Fred Cohen is medical director of Headache Intervention and an assistant professor of medicine and neurology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. He's one of the few headache specialists in the country trained in both internal medicine and headache medicine, has over 40 publications in journals including The Lancet and Cephalalgia, and has lived with migraine himself since his teens.

In this conversation, you'll explore:

• Why migraine is a neuroinflammatory condition, not a vascular one, and why some medical schools still teach the outdated version
• The "broken thermostat" phenomenon of chronic sensitization, and how untreated migraine can convince your brain that constant pain is normal
• Why only about 30% of people with migraine ever experience aura, and the surprising range of ways it can actually show up
• The current treatment landscape, from triptans to CGRP therapies, Botox, neuromodulation devices, and what's coming next
• Why Dr. Cohen calls this the golden age of headache medicine, and what that means if you gave up on treatment years ago

If migraine has ever made you feel like your body was working against you, or like you'd already tried everything, this conversation will change how you see both.

You can find Fred at: Website | Instagram | Episode Transcript

Next week, we're sitting down with Marisa Renee Lee to talk about why the tidy stories we tell ourselves about grief and resilience tend to fall apart, and what it actually looks like to build a life around pain instead of waiting to get past it. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don’t miss any upcoming episodes!

Check out our sponsors and resources: Visit Our Sponsor Page

Share your midlife reinvention story with us HERE.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

Chris Guillebeau has spent fifteen years writing about the questions that keep smart, capable people stuck. He is back on the show to talk about his new book, Time Anxiety, the clearest thing he has written yet on why "get up an hour earlier" backfires and what actually helps.

In this conversation, you'll explore:

• Why your brain is chronically wrong about how much time anything takes, and the fifteen-minute fix for chronic lateness
• The eighth day exercise, a way to find out what you actually want to do with your time by imagining a day with zero obligation to anyone else
• The traffic light method for working with your real energy instead of fighting it
• Why swapping the word "productive" for "valuable" changes how a day feels
• The shame so many caretakers feel about carving out time for themselves, and the answer Gretchen Rubin gave Chris that changed how he thinks about it

If you've ever felt like your calendar is lying to you about how much time you have, this is the conversation for it.

You can find Chris at: Website | A Year of Mental Health Substack | Instagram | Episode Transcript

Next week, we're sitting down with Dr. Fred Cohen to talk about why almost everything you've been told about migraines is outdated, and what the science actually says about treating them. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don’t miss any upcoming episodes!

Check out our sponsors and resources: Visit Our Sponsor Page

Share your midlife reinvention story with us HERE.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

Leidy Klotz is a behavioral scientist and engineering professor at the University of Virginia who studies how and why humans design. His research has appeared in Nature and Science, and he's been interviewed everywhere from Hidden Brain to Freakonomics to The Atlantic. Before any of that, he spent 22 years as a professional soccer player and then built schools for a living, which is part of why his take on space is so physical and so lived-in.

In this conversation, you'll explore:

• The three psychological needs that every space either feeds or starves, and why they trace straight back to hunter-gatherer survival
• Why Susan Cain's open-office backlash and today's return-to-office mandates are the same failure wearing different clothes
• The strange, well-documented phenomenon of "habituation," including the story of an architecture student who walked past a six-story landmark building for years without ever seeing it
• A simple practice called "space before screen," and why the top of a parking garage might be the cheapest awe you'll ever find
• What it means to build a space that keeps someone's memory alive, drawn from one of the most personal stories Leidy has ever told on a podcast

If you've ever felt something shift the moment you walked into a certain room and couldn't say why, this conversation gives you the language for it.

You can find Leidy at: Website | LinkedIn | Episode Transcript

Next week, we're sitting down with Chris Guillebeau to talk about why the anxious feeling that you're running out of time might be less about your calendar and more about a story you've never questioned. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss any upcoming episodes!

Check out our sponsors and resources: Visit Our Sponsor Page

Share your midlife reinvention story with us HERE.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

Leisa Peterson spent three decades inside the financial services industry before a near-fatal event forced her to see how far she had drifted from her own life. Today she coaches people, most of them women, on the inherited stories that quietly run their financial decisions long after childhood ends, and how to rewrite them, along with their financial futures.

In this conversation, you'll hear:

• Why twins raised in the exact same household can end up in completely different financial and emotional places as adults
• The specific questions to ask a financial advisor before you hire one, and the one answer that should make you walk away
• Why financial regret research shows the real damage isn't the bad decision, it's the silence around it
• How to start defining your own "enough" instead of borrowing someone else's number
• What Leisa's husband's diagnosis taught her about the assets that never show up on a bank statement

If you've ever felt behind, ashamed, or just quietly unsure whether you're getting this right, this conversation will change how you think about all of it.

You can find Leisa at: Website | Instagram | Episode Transcript

Next week, we're sitting down with Leidy Klotz to talk about how the rooms you live in every day shape how much control, connection, and competence you feel, often without you ever noticing it. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don’t miss any upcoming episodes!

Check out our sponsors and resources: Visit Our Sponsor Page

Share your midlife reinvention story with us HERE.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

Jessica Ortner is a New York Times bestselling author and co-founder of The Tapping Solution, a movement that has brought EFT Tapping to millions worldwide, fueling hundreds of published studies, a massively downloaded app with tens of millions of sessions completed, and work that now extends to veterans, schools, and communities in crisis.

In this conversation, you'll explore:

• What tapping is, where it came from, and how it works.
• Why positive thinking and reframing often fail, and what the nervous system actually needs to release stress
• The cortisol study that shows a serious reduction in stress hormones from a single session, and what that means for your daily life
• How tapping physically rewires the brain's response to food cravings, trauma, and intrusive thoughts, with fMRI data to back it
• Why your body can hold chronic pain in ways that have nothing to do with the original injury, and tapping might help
• How to use tapping covertly before a difficult conversation, a big presentation, or a social situation when anxiety tends to take over

You don't have to believe this works for it to work. You just have to try it.

You can find Jessica at: Website | Instagram | Episode Transcript

Next week, next week we're sitting down with Leisa Peterson to talk about why the quiet question "am I actually behind with money?" never goes away, no matter how many articles you've read or podcasts you've listened to — and what it actually takes to resolve it at the level it lives. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss any upcoming episodes.

Check out our offerings & partners: 

• Join My New Writing Project: Awake at the Wheel
• Visit Our Sponsor Page For Great Resources & Discount Codes

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Share your midlife reinvention story with us HERE.

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

This is Part 2 of a special two-part midyear series on Good Life Project. In Part 1, Jonathan led a different kind of honest check-in, setting down the scorecard version of taking stock and actually looking at the one part of life that has been running quietly low. This episode is the moving part. It’s about taking action and building momentum, without waiting for a plan.

In this episode, you'll explore:

• Why plans fail, and why the reason is not the one you've been told. The flaw isn't you. It's how plans are built.
• The difference between a plan and a move, and why only one of them has ever actually changed a life.
• Seven elements that make a move more likely to survive a bad week, including Peter Gollwitzer's research on implementation intentions.
• The four traps that turn a move back into a plan, and how to recognize them before they happen.
• Why the middle of the year is one of the most powerful fresh start landmarks available, and almost nobody uses it.
• A five-step sequence you'll work through before this episode ends, leaving with a specific move already made, not planned.

This episode is for anyone who has spent the first half of this year meaning to do something and hasn't yet. Not because you lacked motivation, but because you were waiting for the right conditions that were never going to arrive. They don't have to. You just have to make one move.

Episode Transcript

If you LOVED this episode, you can find the 1-page worksheet HERE.

Next week, I'm sitting down with an old friend, Jessica Ortner, to explore something that most people have never tried, that looks a little ridiculous at first, and that turns out to have a surprisingly serious body of research behind it. It's called tapping. We're not going to sell it, and we're not going to dismiss it. We're going to give it a genuinely honest look: what the science does and doesn't support, who it's actually for, and then Jessica is going to guide me through a real session, live, on the episode that you can follow along with in real time. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss it.

Check out our offerings & partners: 

• Join My New Writing Project: Awake at the Wheel
• Visit Our Sponsor Page For Great Resources & Discount Codes

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

Jonathan Fields has spent 14 years exploring what it takes to build a life that genuinely feels like yours. In this solo episode, he gets personal about a stretch that looked, by every external measure, like one of the best runs he'd had in years. A major work transition, real momentum in business, and every morning from 7:30 to 9, writing the first draft of his first novel. A genuinely good season. And one that was quietly drawing down on something no scorecard ever caught.

What you'll explore in this conversation:

• Why grading yourself against January goals in July is the least useful thing you can do at the midpoint of the year, and what to reach for instead
• The three Good Life Buckets framework (Vitality, Connection, Contribution) as a practical audit tool, not an abstract idea
• Two ways a bucket drains that most driven, successful people never see coming: the leak and the missing refill
• Why the most dangerous bucket is often not the one that aches, but the one filling and draining at the same time
• Three reckoning questions that surface something more honest than any goal list you've ever written
• Why so many of us would rather stay tired and certain than rested and unsure, and what it actually costs us

This is Part 1 of a two-part series. Part 2 arrives in a few days with the specific actions to take for your mid-year wake-up call.

Episode Transcript

If you LOVED this episode, you can find the 1-page worksheet HERE.

Next week, we're coming back for Part 2 of this series with Jonathan to talk about what to actually do once you've named the bucket, and why you don't need a plan for the second half of your year. You need a move. One small, real, repeatable move. And we're going to figure it out together in real time before that episode is over. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss it.

Check out our offerings & partners: 

• Join My New Writing Project: Awake at the Wheel
• Visit Our Sponsor Page For Great Resources & Discount Codes

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

Dr. Joshua Coleman has spent more than four decades as a practicing psychologist and is a Senior Fellow with the Council on Contemporary Families. His own daughter once cut off contact with him. That experience, and everything he has learned since, shaped his work helping families find their way back to each other. He is one of the most trusted voices in the country on family estrangement and reconciliation.

In this conversation, you will explore:

• Why estrangement rates are at historically high levels and what massive cultural shifts are driving them
• The five defensive moves parents make that almost always make things worse, including why fighting for fairness is the most damaging trap of all
• What a genuinely healing apology actually sounds like, and why most apologies miss the mark entirely
• Why radical acceptance and hope are not opposites, and how to hold both at the same time
• How the principles of repair transfer to sibling estrangements and to grandparents cut off from grandchildren

If someone you love has pulled away and you cannot figure out why, or if you are the one who has needed distance and are wondering what repair could look like, this is the conversation for it.

You can find Joshua at: Website | Instagram | Family Troubles Substack | Episode Transcript

Next week, I am going solo, actually for the entire week, for a two-part midyear summer series about really taking a fresh look at where we are right now. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss it.

Check out our offerings & partners: 

• Join My New Writing Project: Awake at the Wheel
• Visit Our Sponsor Page For Great Resources & Discount Codes

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.