You're listening to Doing It Right with me, Pandora Sykes, a podcast where I talk to experts about the myths, anxieties and trends of modern life.

In this series, series four, I'll be exploring topics including postpartum psychosis, sociopathy and how technology has

flattened personal taste. This is a podcast that asks, what can we do to understand life

better? Not just for ourselves, but for everyone. For the first time ever, I'm dropping

the whole series in one as a capsule

box set, so tuck in and don't forget to let me know your thoughts at doing it right pod

at gmail.com. Corey Keyes is a sociologist and psychologist renowned for being an early pioneer of mental well-being.

He's been researching his theories of languishing and flourishing for almost 20 years,

but it wasn't until the organisational psychologist Adam Grant name-checked languishing in a piece he wrote during the pandemic, which became the New York

Times most read and shared piece of 2021, and I'll link that piece in the show notes, that Corey's

theories became well known outside of his professional fields. In response, Corey wrote a book,

languishing, how to feel alive again in a world that wears us down.

But what is languishing? Well, explains Corey, it's feeling demotivated, aimless, without meaning

or purpose. It's the absence of mental well-being.

Sound familiar? You might be languishing.

In this episode, Coy explains how we got to be in an epidemic of languishing,

how it's different to burnout or depression,

and the habits that can lead to a state of languishing,

like passive entertainment, which I found particularly interesting as we are all streaming and scrolling our lives away right now.

But it's not all doom. Corey also explains languishing's opposing force, flourishing,

which is about not just feeling good, but functioning well.

What does it mean to flourish?

...