Good Life Project

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!

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

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.