Good Life Project

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.