#40 - Professor Corey Keyes - Rediscovering Connection Beyond Languishing

In this episode of Rediscovering Connection, I sit down with Professor Corey Keyes - renowned sociologist, pioneering mental health researcher, and author of “Languishing: How to Feel Alive Again in a World That Wears Us Down.” Corey shares the real story behind his work on languishing and flourishing, the power of social fitness, and why connection is far more than counting friends or likes.

We explore:
✅ Why social wellbeing is always the hardest to achieve - and the most overlooked key to happiness
✅ Flourishing vs. mental health: why “feeling fine” is not enough
✅ The science of meaningful relationships: quality over quantity, every single time
✅ Social fitness - what it is, and why it matters as much as physical or spiritual fitness
✅ Friendship, loneliness, and the complex path back to real connection
✅ Corey’s own story - healing trauma, building community, and the messy beauty of connection in everyday life.

If you’ve ever felt disconnected - even with a full social feed - or wondered how to nurture deep, lasting relationships, this conversation with Corey Keyes may transform the way you understand social health.

🎙️ Tune in for honest stories, science-backed wisdom, and practical advice on flourishing in our complex, fast-paced world.

Timestamps
[00:00] – Intro: Meet Professor Corey Keyes and the truth about social wellbeing
[04:15] – Why quality beats quantity in relationships—social media myths and real-life loneliness
[08:30] – Connection, trauma, and healing: Corey’s personal journey
[13:20] – Flourishing demystified: how mental health is much more than the absence of illness
[18:45] – Social fitness, group fear, and building community after setbacks
[25:10] – Why it’s so hard to reconnect—and how grief opens the door to new connections
[31:30] – Practical ways to curate your life with meaningful reminders and moments
[37:00] – Teaching happiness: embracing both sadness and joy
[41:20] – Spiritual fitness, vulnerability, and finding friendship in unexpected places
[47:55] – What makes connection worth rediscovering—messy, real, and lifegiving
[54:00] – Closing inspiration: connection isn’t perfect, but it’s always worth the work

Links
Find Corey Keyes:
Book: “Languishing: How to Feel Alive Again in a World That Wears Us Down” (Audible, Bookshop, Amazon)
Academic research: Google Scholar (Corey Keyes)

Connect with Host Shelley Doyle
Website: The Communiverse https://www.thecommuniverse.com/
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/shelleydoyle

---
I hope our conversation inspires you to rediscover connection in your own life.

Subscribe now and let the magic unfold.

Love & sparkles,
✨Shelley

About Your Host

Hello you, I’m Shelley Doyle, founder of The Communiverse™, learning designer, facilitator, and host of the Rediscovering Connection podcast. My Master’s research focused on the relational investments of remote and hybrid leaders, published with a financial services firm and supported by Mitacs. With 20 years of international business and communications leadership, I now help remote and relocated leaders feel more socially wealthy - personally and professionally, online and offline - through programs, consulting, and training.

I have 5 spots available in my program Social Wealth Activation, starting w/c Dec 1st. Email: shelley@communiverse.vip to request info.

Find out more at TheCommuniverse.com or find me on LinkedIn.

To hear when new episodes drop, subscribe to my weekly newsletter, or check out recent episodes.

Transcript

Corey Keyes: 0:00

I found as a sociologist, the literature on social connection and, and networks, um, almost over encouraging people to view. The problem with connection is a problem of quantity.

Shelley Doyle: 0:17

Oh, yeah. Alone,

Corey Keyes: 0:18

not quality. The quality with which you comport yourself. It almost gets second, if any attention. But it's as if we talk about connection as only quantity. Like that matters. Like, and you hear it again and again when an article's published, oh, we've lost one average friendship over the last decade. Like, that's somehow some monumental important thing. And everyone then gets the idea, well, oh, I, I need more. Let's, right. It's sort of like a to-do list. Let's add more, and they forget quality. So I was very careful there. I did not want to encourage this quantitative obsession with connection to the exclusion. And the reason being is there's this beautiful research in aging literature showing that with age. Um, the amount of time we spend in connection declines, and yet wellbeing increases up until the very end of life. And it's because we start to prioritize quality over quantity, and we prune and cut out all the, the chaff and the useless and the relationships that are just there, but, but don't add anything to meaningful contact. And so I think we're, we're missing that so much. So in that chapter, I really wanted people to get the message. It's quality people and it's not quantity.

Shelley Doyle: 1:51

Which is the complete opposite to what we've been taught in the social media emergence, which is numbers, numbers, likes, likes, and uh, and meanwhile, the levels of loneliness and perceived disconnection has skyrocketed. And that was really for me, uh, a realization that I needed to be part of the change. Hello and welcome to season two of Rediscovering Connection with me, Shelly Doyle. If you are new here, welcome and if you are returning, then hello. And thank you for your patience. I've had a six month hiatus whilst I've been completing my masters, which is now done. I'll be collecting my parchment paper this Thursday, and I have my graduation ceremony in a couple of weeks. So, um, I've been focused on the social health and wealth of remote and hybrid people leaders. My guest today is someone whose work has deeply, supported my understanding of social wellbeing. Professor Corey Keys, leading up to this interview, I have been listening to your book on Audible or weekend, uh, called Languishing, how to Feel Alive Again in a World That Wears us Down. So, I'd love to just welcome you here and, um, brand new book this year. Like how is life for you right now and how is this new book being received in your life?

Corey Keyes: 3:31

Well, thank you for having me, Shelly, and it's wonderful to meet you. And, and I, I cherish the time and the opportunity to talk about social connection, which, um, given all the podcasts I've done regarding, you know, coming in after the way in the wake of my book, I, we rarely, it's funny how none of the interviews really engaged much of that topic, it really is, um, a distillation of my life's work. And frankly, I don't think it did it justice because editors and publishers want things differently than we academics do. And so I tried to thread a needle in between being a little scientific, which, which is where my heart is, but I'm also an artist, a, a storyteller, and that, so this felt, the book felt really good to write. It was therapeutic, to tell you the truth. So I, I get these amazing emails out of the blue from people, um, that who have been deeply affected by the book. But the story that I told, which was the background. About my own journey on, on,'cause there was a personal journey that accompanied the scientific journey that, and I never told anyone about that for, for all the years I did my science. And yet everyone just assumed it just comes out of nowhere, you know? And it's just this amazing creative process. But in fact it was part of healing, um, a lot of trauma for me.

Shelley Doyle: 5:13

We, we teach what we need to learn and, and passion comes from pain. There are a few things that I've learned over the last few years. Yeah.

Corey Keyes: 5:25

Yeah. Either it'll break you for a while, um, or badly or that, that it will form you in ways. If you can let it in, but be gradual and kind with yourself as you let it in, because I had to face it. I, I thought I could outsmart and outrun it and out, you know, perform it and know I was there. So, but I learned to be gentle and kind and, and patient with myself in the process.

Shelley Doyle: 6:01

And how have you, you had decades of researching this topic. Um. I would love to understand how, how it's felt to be researching a topic that you, that you feel deep down or mm-hmm. You certainly felt for many years, and I understand you must have so many of the tools and strategies to get beyond it, to get to flourishing, but we, we all have a set point in all facets of our life. So we might have a set point for happiness. We can still have the tools and strategies to, to work our way up, but there's gonna be, without proactive effort, perhaps we come down to a certain set point. Would the same be true of flourishing?

Corey Keyes: 6:49

The last time I taught my seminar on happiness, which was in 2021, um, I, we had been reviewing evidence to on that very fact. And, and the evidence was that there are definite ways in which life events can change your set point. You really need, if you want to flourish, you need to be prepared to deal with bad things.

Shelley Doyle: 7:14

Mm-hmm.

Corey Keyes: 7:15

Without, don't let them, um. Take down your set point and, and change your course in your life. Right?

Shelley Doyle: 7:25

If we continue to negatively ruminate on them.

Corey Keyes: 7:31

Mm, yeah. Well, yes. Um, I think it's also, I love this, uh, work, um, on acceptance and commitment therapy because I'm deeply, uh, influenced by Buddhism and I, I, I think there's this notion that people just, they want, they just want the good stuff. Now, if the bad stuff I want, you know, I want to get through it quickly and move on'cause, but that, that idea of suppressing it or moving on. Is is not a way to deal with negativity. And I think rumination is, it will come back. It's just like the white bear studies that Dan Wagner did. He would, he would point out and uh, and have his research subject say, think about a white bear. Um, imagine a white bear, right? And then now don't think about this while we're working on the next, next task. But having just suggested it and then told them not to think about it, it became more available. Mm-hmm. And they kept intruding into their thoughts while they were trying to do something else. And that's the point I take away from acceptance commitment there you must. Um, sit with and deal with the bad things when they come.

Shelley Doyle: 8:48

Mm. There's, there's something I've heard recently, um, about, you know, when you get a song trapped in your heads and it just, it's like an earworm, it just keeps going, right? You have to, to, to get rid of it. You play out the whole song. So it's the same with circumstances, right? You play it out, get it done, and then you can have the acceptance.

Corey Keyes: 9:12

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. There, there, I think it was the zar effect, right? You have to let, right. But I'm, I'm, now I'm really testing my intro psychology information, but for me, and I love music. I don't know if you're a musical, but my wife and I love it. I will get a song in my, I'll call it my mental Repertoire and it will be there because there's a period I'm going through and I just think of it as it's, there's like these little epics. Like a couple days. That's life. Then things will shift. And I do that with a lot of things. Like I had long hair. You saw the, my book cover, I had long hair for a long, a long time. And then suddenly I went in, uh, in the last six months and I didn't tell my wife and I came home with the short hair and she was like. Oh my God. And I said, yes. I was putting down, I, I was leaving behind a period in my life and now I'm entering into a new period.

Shelley Doyle: 10:09

Mm. Yes. I love it. I love it. And I've, I've recently gone kind of, uh, red kind of strawberry blonde, which I've never been before. So, uh, I guess I, this is me like finishing my thesis and it's taken me four years to get through this master's. So it's, uh mm-hmm. I've taken the scenic route as I, as I like to say, I, we spent, um, four months of it living in an eco village, um, to see how it was to live in community. Um, and it was an intense experience. We ate together 13 times a week, um, with like 12 to 20 other human beings.

Corey Keyes: 10:51

I wish you would've explained that in your talk, because I listened to your talk. Oh, really? 10 next talk. And I thought it was rather. Intriguing I was trying to fill in. Well, why was that? Community immersion s challenging

Shelley Doyle: 11:09

Uhhuh, and I

Corey Keyes: 11:10

suspect it because it's comes out like you, you're not used to in this day and age community being much like water coming out at the end of a fire hose. It takes a while to get used to that kind of togetherness.

Shelley Doyle: 11:22

There was so many parts of your book that spoke to me. Um. One, one of which was just about friend versus friendship. Like what conversations in friendships mean in comparisons, just being a friend. I really appreciated how practical, these insights and illustrations were to really let people know how it feels and, helping people to emulate what it is to be in friendship.

Corey Keyes: 11:55

Yeah. Well, you, and I'm almost going to raise this as a question to you as well, because, because I found as a sociologist, the literature on social connection and, and networks, um, almost over encouraging people to view. The problem with connection is a problem of quantity.

Shelley Doyle: 12:19

Oh, yeah. Alone,

Corey Keyes: 12:20

not quality. The quality with which you comport yourself. It almost gets second, if any attention. But it's as if we talk about connection as only quantity. Like that matters. Like, and you hear it again and again when an article's published, oh, we've lost one average friendship over the last decade. Like, that's somehow some monumental important thing. And everyone then gets the idea, well, oh, I, I need more. Let's, right. It's sort of like a to-do list. Let's add more, and they forget quality. So I was very careful there. I did not want to encourage this quantitative obsession with connection to the exclusion. And the reason being is there's this beautiful research in aging literature showing that with age. Um, the amount of time we spend in connection declines, and yet wellbeing increases up until the very end of life. And it's because we start to prioritize quality over quantity, and we prune and cut out all the, the chaff and the useless and the relationships that are just there, but, but don't add anything to meaningful contact. And so I think we're, we're missing that so much. So in that chapter, I really wanted people to get the message. It's quality people and it's not quantity.

Shelley Doyle: 13:53

Which is the complete opposite to what we've been taught in the social media emergence, which is numbers, numbers, likes, likes, and uh, and meanwhile, the levels of loneliness and perceived disconnection has skyrocketed. And that was really for me, uh, a realization that I needed to be part of the change.'cause I moved over here during the pandemic, and I, I've been blessed with being part of really rich friendship groups through my life. So thankfully I haven't had to face feelings of loneliness. Um, I'd say acutely during my life up until when I came to Canada and then we were thrown back into lockdown just as we were starting to make a few connections. Didn't have anyone to bubble up with. My children were so young at the time that they weren't kind of giving me the social interaction that I needed. I kind of think now four years later, even my relationship with my kids is very different, so they, they can give me a lot back now, but at that time I was feeling deeply disconnected. Albeit having access to everybody I've ever worked with, been friends with, you know, on social media. But I just felt going on there, it was like being, you know, punched in the guts. It didn't help to see people that used to be part of my life having a wonderful time. It, it made it worse. So I was like, we need a new way. And to go to that, yeah, we need to think smaller. One of the really curious findings from my research with 1200 leaders, one of the questions was, how many people do you feel at ease discussing private matters with? And we look to local friends, um, friends more than 30 minutes away, relatives, professional connections of the. People more than 30 minutes away. The numbers were so small, I think it was 58% had zero to one connection beyond 30 minutes that they felt at ease discussing private matters with obviously some others. There was like some others would have nine, but the majority, the numbers were incredibly small. And really it was those people in that 30 minute proximity that they have these trusted relationships with. When you think how amazing technology is, and we are not trees, we do move around, but still we keep kind of our trusted connections very, very close. Um, well, isn't that it?

Corey Keyes: 16:48

I think there is, this is, this is interesting because I don't think, I don't feel comfortable talk, talking to people about private matters in any other setting except one-on-one in person. So I, you, you, you can, you can text a little. I I, but I wouldn't. And, um, I, I sense more people are, are, I'm not the exception and I think we missed the point, right. The loss of confidants that researchers in my field have documented isn't that we don't want them or don't take the time. It's just that we, especially Americans, have been encouraged to, to simply disperse and go wherever your career takes you. And we damn with any loss of any closeness that comes with it. And so you don't, you, you, you have to recreate shop in a new place, in a new town with nobody, you know, and you don't, the people you used to confide in, you left behind. And I am not gonna confide, and I suspect your most people in your study would say, I'm not gonna confide, um, online. And no, even the telephone seems awkward to me. It doesn't seem like the place where I talk of my, my deepest concerns and my fears and my vulnerabilities, it's just doesn't feel right to me. Maybe others are okay with it, but I'm telling you, we missed the point. I don't think people are losing confidence. They're moving away from confidants.

Shelley Doyle: 18:25

Exactly. We're moving away. That's the problem. And, and I think in all facets of our life, we leave jobs very easily. We leave home very easily. Uh, and I think if word got around of the importance of connection and grounding, um, there's this, there's this definite trend of like, the return isn't there. There's so many stories of the return. You go and you learn and then you return. Um, and, and you can understand why. You take all that wisdom back and then you can ground back in where you've got familiar faces and trust. But then I guess on the flip side, I go back to my hometown now and it's, you know, there's loads of people that I don't know anymore because loads of new people have moved there.

Corey Keyes: 19:15

Yeah. And it, same with my little town of three lakes in northern Wisconsin. It's, I, if I, and I went back there because my sister moved back because that's the only. Real home we ever knew. And that's when after we were adopted and a lot of people have, have, have left. And so I mean, you, you're in the same situation as you're saying that I'm remini, I'm trying to imagine myself in, in, uh, two centuries ago with my ancestors in their tribal settings where the journey would be, you would go out there for a couple days or a month and you would go on this journey and you would learn and you would bring it back to your group. You would always come home. Now there are animal species. Yes. Like I, every spring our, our bird feeders get ransacked by young male bears'cause they get kicked out of their f Right. And they have to go re and create a whole new one. We're not like bears and other animals where we, but at least in. A couple hundred years ago, and for thousands of years, our ancestors evolved in these tribal settings of hunting and gathering. And so the journey was you go out there and you learn, and then you bring everything you learned back and you, you share it with others. And that's not what happens today. I think that's one amazing predicament. We call it progress, but I don't know if I raised the problem, but I don't have a solution to tell you the truth. Shelly, I think we, we need to understand this one thing. I remember being in Italy and having, and, to give some talks, and then I hosted some Italian students and I asked them, what made you choose the college that you went to? They said it was the closest one to my family.

Shelley Doyle: 21:09

Hmm.

Corey Keyes: 21:11

They wanna go home almost every weekend and, and cook and, and have break bread with their family and, right. That, that's not my, my US students. They look at, you're like, oh my God, you would choose close to home. Imagine if you got into Princeton, but you got into a state school close to home. You wouldn't, you're telling me you would choose close to home over Princeton. Yes, some of them would. But Americans, and I think it's a lot of Canadians. Oh my god, you know, I'm gonna leave it all behind because, ah, now I get to go into the top five university, and yet they're miserable. Some of'em disconnected, lonely, suicidal, depressed, languishing, and they wonder why. Mm-hmm. Because we leave behind the very thing. You know, I'm not gonna romanticize family. Family wasn't a great place for me. And, you know, we can talk about this double-edged sword that I write about in connection and social relationships. It's where I've experienced most of my deep, deepest pain and trauma. But it's also the place in the birthplace of the greatest and loves and laws. Um, so we just leave it behind. And, and with this idea of like accomplishment and resumes, But here's the fascinating thing that I didn't get a chance to write about EV and every study I've ever seen published, doesn't matter where you go in the world, out of the three components of wellbeing on my measure, emotional, psychological, and social, social wellbeing is always the lowest, always. I don't care if you go to Asian communitarian communal societies or you go to what we call our individualistic society social wellbeing. Pe. PE is dead last. In other words, it's much harder to achieve any of those five dimensions of social wellbeing. It's easier to to, to achieve the psychological and the emotional stuff. And I've been thinking lately this whole idea that human beings are social creatures may be overblown. Yes we are, but just because we're social creatures doesn't mean it's easy. It's, forgive my words, it's god damn hard being social as you know. And that's what I loved about what you're talking, you were very honest, put into a, an immersed into a very communals situ. It's overwhelming. Why? Because I think we're social creatures, but we also need, some of us as introverts, need more time alone. But even normal extroverts need solitude and time to reflect. So we may be social, but social is not easy.

Shelley Doyle: 24:09

You spoke in the book about mattering. Um, and I often speak about the people that matter. And in the book you wrote about the people. Do people depend on you? Do people listen to you? Do people pay attention to you? Are you, are you an important part of someone's life? Would you be missed?

Corey Keyes: 24:28

Would you be missed?

Shelley Doyle: 24:29

Mm. Yeah.

Corey Keyes: 24:31

And I wrote about this p. Professor, uh, um, that he, he, he's on my mind now and I wrote about, um, the email exchange we had as I was writing about this book and how we could have just sort of had treated this as a student professor relationship and just moved past each other on, but there was something there and we both felt it. And to this, I, I just lost him last week. He died at the age of 91 and he was like a father to me. And, and besides the dedication in the front of my book, which is the most important part of my book by the way,'cause those, my nana and papa were the most important earth angels I've ever, I will have ever known on this planet. And Bill Brown's right up there,'cause he was like a father to me. Ever since my college days as an undergraduate to this day. And I am so happy and I'm sad and happy at the same time.'cause he saw that, he read the book and he knows, he mattered so much to me. And I tell people in that chapter, don't wait to tell people this. Tell'em now you may miss the opportunity. I never ever left my house once I was adopted, ever without hugging and, and giving a small kiss to my nana because if I never came back, that would be the last thing I wanted her to know. I loved her because she mattered so much to me.

Shelley Doyle: 26:20

Mm-hmm.

Corey Keyes: 26:21

We don't come on people. It's such an important act that we can do every day, every day.

Shelley Doyle: 26:31

Like I have this curse that I miss. People all the time. I miss people come to my mind all the time that I miss. But the same was true when I was back in the uk. I have, I come from a very distributed family. I'm always thinking of people, I'm always missing people. Um, so sometimes I will reach out and say, just thinking of you, I miss you. Mm-hmm. And they say it can take seven seconds to send a message and you never know how that might impact someone's day.

Corey Keyes: 27:05

Yeah. And I also love adding, like I was thinking of this time Mm. Together when we did this.

Shelley Doyle: 27:13

Oh, I love that build.

Corey Keyes: 27:14

That is a beautiful addition to a sort of, I'm thinking about you.

Shelley Doyle: 27:19

Mm. I,

Corey Keyes: 27:20

I just have to let you know this. You might, you, you might, you are not out of my heart or mind. We're, we're not, we're separated now. But this is the beautiful thing about human beings having just talked about the fact that we're distant and we can't always share the things that we wanna share.'cause we want do that in person there, but. They're in our hearts and our minds all the time. And we don't tell people that.'Cause I wrote about that wall in my book. They're there symbolically, but they're here.

Shelley Doyle: 27:53

Yes, yes,

Corey Keyes: 27:55

they're here.

Shelley Doyle: 27:56

And in Dunbar's number, um, he talks about, uh, consciousness being able to hold 150 people relationships. Yeah. I believe that with the emergence of social media and just so many, we're being exposed to so many people, those, some of those people that have been important to you that have mattered can drop out of that 150 consciousness because we are not. Exposed to them. So like, mapping can feel hard, but I think it can be really important, um, to, to map the people who have mattered in our life. Uh, whether or not we kind of reach out there and then, but doing so can help our natural impulses to reawaken, I have to be very, very mindful of the time that I spend exposed to other people. Uh, even in so much as during my master's journey, I started watching a series called Virgin River, which is basically like a soap opera. Um, but it helped because there was a set of characters. I got to know the characters. I didn't need to introduce new characters to my life at that stage. I had enough going on, so it was like when I needed to decompress, I'd put on this show. Um, so that, yeah, that helped me to kind of contain the people in my life. Yeah. Anyway, I digressed.

Corey Keyes: 29:34

Well, well, I think it's intriguing to me and uh, that you said it was a curse to miss people, and I am. I don't think it's a curse. Having given what we just talked about, I think it's a blessing and it has to be cultivated. It just reminded me of my wife and I just celebrated our 39th anniversary and together we've, we've done so much together and traveled and exploit the world. But if you were to walk through our house and I could walk, walk you through, there's nothing hanging on the wall that doesn't represent moments that we had and experiences we had together through connection. So that every day my house is a constant reminder of all the things and people,'cause it wasn't just us. These are often other PE with other people. And usually people like my professor, like Bill Brown, people like parents and my grandparents, um, and friends in a, and a couple of friends that we had. So at my house is deliberately curated from lamps to art, a lot of art and tapestries that we picked up all over the world that were extremely embedded and saturated with moments of meaningful connection. And so it constantly reminds me, I live in it. Yes, I know why I did that, but that was a very deliberate thing. And I suspect because I knew up to the age of 12 what it was like not to be wanted and to be ultimately alone and disconnected when I was adopted and taken in by my grandparents. It changed so much for me. Yes, I needed to be transplanted, but I realized connection was at the heart of healing. But the first 12 years was connection is also about the traumas I carry, but the people, I realized that people really mattered.

Shelley Doyle: 31:39

So when we, have a feeling that we miss someone, spending a few minutes to really like, tap in and remember a time when you were last together, the way that you feel when you are together, and then if you feel called to perhaps reach out, but otherwise just enjoying that you had the blessing of those times together. Yeah. So you can like relive the happy memories.

Corey Keyes: 32:04

When I was teaching, um, especially in the spring se semester, my, my happiness course was filled with seniors who were graduating.'cause it took'em a while to get into the class. But I was glad it happened at the end because it would make a couple points. One is that you could feel happy and sad at the same time. We're we're not wired. So that the absence, happiness is just the absence of sadness. And just because you're not feeling a negative emotion doesn't mean you're feeling good either. But they would resonate with this as the closer this they came to graduating, the more sad and happy they felt. And I said, this is a beautiful moment. Embrace both. Don't just embrace the happiness, embrace the sadness, and here's why. Because it is telling you, you are leaving behind something that meant something to you. Do not ever forget that sadness is not something to avoid. It's there to tell you you are losing something that matters to you and that you invested something here and that you will be leaving a sadness, but you're also happy because you all that work and achievement was worth it. The sadness is a beautiful thing too, because you invest yourself in things that you have to leave behind now, and they got it, and I got it just recently, uh, three weeks ago, my very senior dog and I still miss him. We, he, he had to pass on. He was just, we cared for him in, in his frailty as much as we could. And I'm like, and I heard this again and again with people who just lost a, a pet. Sometimes I felt when I was so sad that I didn't ever want to do it again. But then I realized that would be the greatest loss of life, to not reconnect and love something else as much as I loved the dog that just died. That's it. You can't have one without the other. And that's the beautiful thing about connection. It's, it's just this, uh, bittersweet thing that makes, that's what makes life so beautiful.

Shelley Doyle: 34:26

And what about reconnecting? When I spoke to Dr. Kfi card, he said in all of his research, that was one of the hardest things for people to reconnect. Even though the positive benefits of reconnecting can be so great, if it is someone who's really mattered to you and still does matter to you, but something, you know, distance or time has come between you. Is there anything, anything in your work or in your, in your experience that might help people to, to reconnect?

Corey Keyes: 35:02

Not in my work, but personally, I, I think doing justice to grieving is so important. I can't tell you how many times I've, I've cried and, and, and, and I do that in front of my wife and I do that when I'm walking out there and with my friends and I go like, what's going on Cory? I just, oh, I, it hurts to lose something in someone you love. And I think that part of doing it justice, I'm using that word in a warm sense, giving it what it needs. You have to feel it so that you can let it go.'cause once I think I've, I'm over this, I will look at all those pictures and remember all the good stuff. Not, not the fact when he died and how much I miss him. I will live and relive all the good stuff, and that's all I'll carry forward. For me, that makes it possible to reconnect it's just something about that transition from feeling sad about seeing that, an image of that person or, or animal to suddenly feeling, oh, happy and joyous and content and serene at seeing the same image. When you do that transition, I suspect reconnecting is, is not only possible, it's almost ne necessary. It's like, wow.'cause I think there's a danger of not doing grieving justice that you will not want to get hurt again.

Shelley Doyle: 36:45

Oh yeah. We, we have so many tools at our disposal to just suppress and distract. Mm-hmm. And as, as part of my research into loneliness, like what has come through multiple times is that people don't really know what that feeling feels like because they don't allow it to even come. They're just distracted with screens. And, um, yeah. So it is, part of my program that I took these leaders through the first two weeks was a social media detox. And like, that's not always easy'cause you start to feel feelings that you haven't allowed yourself to feel for a while.

Corey Keyes: 37:25

Mm-hmm. No, I read about this study that's been written about a good, a good amount, which is when. College students were brought into the lab and they had to sit in this, um, room, which was silent. It was sort of like an, uh, a room where audiologists test, hearing, so it was silent and they couldn't bring anything in with them. They had to leave their backpack, their phone, everything behind it was deeply disturbing to them. And, um, 50% of males shocked themself with a very toxic and obnoxious shock. 25% of the females did the same, and they knew, they experienced the shock before they went in so that the researchers wanted them to, to, to be, choose something they knew would be painful. So what happens is this, I read about this, languishing is the same thing. It's such a deeply disturbing silence and invisibility and emptiness. That you will do anything to feel something rather than nothing.

Shelley Doyle: 38:27

Mm-hmm. And

Corey Keyes: 38:27

that's the modern problem. And we're not facing it languishing. And, and'cause languishing by the way, is baked into a lot of, of languishing uh, loneliness is baked into a lot of languishing.

Shelley Doyle: 38:40

Yeah.

Corey Keyes: 38:40

Yeah. And I think people don't realize that there's three questions that get at, um, a deep disconnection. And so a lot of people who are languishing are, are disconnected in addition to other things. And it's really disturbing so much. So the teenagers, when I was writing the book, a study comes out of Hungary and teenagers engaged in non-suicidal, self-harming behaviors at a much higher rate, the more severe they're languishing

Shelley Doyle: 39:14

because they wanna feel something. They want

Corey Keyes: 39:16

something rather than nothing. So quietness today is, uh, when you enforce quietness, it feels like punishment and it's sort of an induction into languishing temporarily, and people run like it. And I write about the ancient Christian monks who talked about acedia, which became the eighth deadly sin, which is the precursor to languishing. They describe it the same way. They would seek distractions from it because that empty haunting feeling is so aversive. People will fill it with anything. Alcohol, drugs, sex, you name it. And even self-harm. Social connection is a, a skill that we're, we're now practicing and I think we, we want it to be orchestrated it's like you wanna go to events. So it happens rather than you thinking that you have the ability and skill to do it on your own. And we did it on our own for thousands and thousands of years, and we can do it on our own today because that's how we're built. It's just a skill we're not practicing.

Shelley Doyle: 40:29

Hmm. It's,

Corey Keyes: 40:29

I write about that. I hear people always talking about, I got so much on my plate. And as an academic, I can't tell you how many times I heard that, and I got so sick of hearing it to the point where I got very snarky and told him, well, just sit down and eat a little bit so that you can make room on your plate. So it's because we're letting life pull us out of ourselves and we never practice the skills for creating the life we want.

Shelley Doyle: 40:56

Mm-hmm. This feels like it's leading us really beautifully into the opposite of languishing, which is flourishing. Yeah. So I'd love to maybe just, uh, hang out in that space a little bit with you and just feeling like. What flourishing really is. I took a few notes from your, from your book about, uh, being a combination. I think there's 14 different points of what really makes up flourishing. Just a couple of them is, uh, warm and trusting relationships, but also having a purpose in your life. Yeah. So it's not only connection, but it is really that intrinsic motivation for knowing that you are doing what you are good at, what's leaning into your skills and talents.

Corey Keyes: 41:49

The thing I, I find fascinating is that more and more people are taking up this research on flourishing and, um, I just used the word to tell you the truth, be honest. Um, I wish I hadn't used the word because now it's every, everyone's sort of thinking they're studying flourishing. I used the word flourishing as a stand in for mental health. Because those two words are very confusing to people. And I found that personally. And then academically, personally, when I would say I'm studying mental health, they would think I'm studying mental health problems or mental illness. I said, that's not what I'm studying. And then this Canadian research study was done on, uh, almost 2000 adults. And they were asked a question, here's two, uh, a set of words, mental illness and mental health. Do they mean the same thing about the same thing or do they refer to different things? And 56% said they refer to the same thing. And that's not true because my research makes it very clear. The absence of mental illness does not mean you're mentally healthy. And so I couldn't use the word mental health until we tried to clear it up and it's taking a long time. And so they're not our people. You know, I, I don't study flourishing per se, because that's an abstraction. That's almost something we're inventing and placing on people's lives. Mental health, I think, has always been there. It's just been ignored. And I think of my work is, is discovering the presence and absence of good mental health because we were so focused on mental illness and its absence for so long that we didn't really understand there was anything beyond that. So I want to be very clear from here on out, all those people who coming along, they think that flourishing stuff is really great. Good, good luck. I study mental health in its absence because nobody before me paid attention to to it. And it was an empty category. It was the absence of mental illness. And so when I use the word flourishing, I'm referring to good mental health, and you only have to have seven out of the 14 signs that are measured in my questionnaire. So you also, when I use the word flourishing, I'm not saying you have to be superman or superwoman. There's a good enough. You get to pick. By the way, there's no prescription in my model either. I don't tell you. You have to have certain qualities. There's 11 signs of functioning well. You get to choose any six you want to prioritize in your life, and then you combine it with at least one of the three. Feeling good, happy, satisfied, or interest in life. Usually, you don't have to bother with the latter, Shelly because feeling good about your life is a, uh, outcome or a product, a prioritizing functioning well in your life. And isn't it interesting? Five out of the 11 are social and nobody talks about the social side of our health, or no, there are people now talking about it. But I did my dissertation in 1995 and it was the first, I was the first person who actually looked at. Social health is something that re represented our personal health. And you need to measure it just like blood pressure and other things. So if you don't have a good sense of contribution, there's a sign that something's potentially Right. With your mental health.'cause human beings need to feel like they have something to give to the world. And I'm not talking about mattering, I'm talking about do you have something of value to give to your community or your family or, right. I I'm wondering

Shelley Doyle: 45:39

Yeah,

Corey Keyes: 45:40

go, go on, on the,

Shelley Doyle: 45:40

on the social coherence one. I'm wondering if anybody could say yes, I can make sense of what is going on in the world right now.

Corey Keyes: 45:49

No. No. And here's the thing, I, I was just up in, um, Winnipeg, um, and they gave a talk to teachers.'cause there's this big initiative on teacher mental health because teachers are leaving the profession. Alarming rates and there's not gonna be enough teachers for our kids, people'cause we're not taking care of our teachers. But, but that's another side. When I talked about that dimension, there was this laugh in the crowd, but it was not a, a kind of, it was an uncomfortable laugh. Laugh like a ha ha Brene Brown epitomized it. When we talked about shame, she said that was not a comfortable laugh. That was an uncomfortable laugh. And it's true, but isn't it interesting? Human beings are meaning making sense, making creatures. Geal, psychologists put would put these dots out there on paper. And guess what? We see images, we connect the dots. They're not disparate in our mind. And when we can't make sense of what's going on in the world around us, we retreat. Or we let other people tell us what the hell is going on in politics and society and culture, and they'll just divide us into camps that serve their needs. So coherence. Oh my God, it's that. It's all time long. But here's the fascinating thing that I didn't get a chance to write about EV and every study I've ever seen published, doesn't matter where you go in the world, out of the three components of wellbeing on my measure, emotional, psychological, and social, social wellbeing is always the lowest, always. I don't care if you go to Asian communitarian communal societies or you go to what we call our individualistic society social wellbeing. Pe. PE is dead last. In other words, it's much harder to achieve any of those five dimensions of social wellbeing. It's easier to to, to achieve the psychological and the emotional stuff. And I've been thinking lately this whole idea that human beings are social creatures may be overblown. Yes we are, but just because we're social creatures doesn't mean it's easy. It's, forgive my words, it's god damn hard being social as you know. And that's what I loved about what you're talking, you were very honest, put into a, an immersed into a very communals situ. It's overwhelming. Why? Because I think we're social creatures, but we also need, some of us as introverts, need more time alone. But even normal extroverts need solitude and time to reflect. And so I think we're, we're, we're overblowing this social nature of ourselves to the point where the data and my, and the studies that use my measure, show it very clear. It doesn't matter where you are in the world. It's hard to have a sense of coherence. It's hard to, to have a sense of belonging. It's hard to have a sense that you're making any contributions to the world and society and your community. It's hard to be accepting of other people, and it's hard to feel that you belong to a society that's growing and becoming better and that you might be part of that. It's hard work, so we may be social, but social is not easy. It's easier to do the psychological and emotional stuff because that's all about me and I. The we and, yes. Oh.

Shelley Doyle: 49:34

It's hard work, but like so is having a consistent gym routine. But we know if we wanna have the fitness, uh, if we wanna have the strength, if, you know, it doesn't have to be at the gym, but, you know, moving our bodies can sometimes feel like hard work, but we can see visibly the positive impact. So helping people to understand that these other parts can also be hard. Yes. And it can feel like work sometimes. Yes. But that rumination that you can have will possibly disappear because you won't even think about if you are lonely or disconnected anymore. It won't even be part of your consciousness because you understand your social needs and you design your life in a way that can satisfy those specific needs.

Corey Keyes: 50:28

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Some friends and I were recently talking about, um, spiritual fitness and I love the word fitness and yes, the idea that somehow you have to work at being spiritual and you have to have certain prerequisites developed in the same way if you were to, um, mountaineer and climb Everest. You can't just go out there and just buy the equipment and think you're ever gonna get anywhere. You have to prepare yourself so that you have the ability, the stamina, the strength, the skills. What about social fitness? I suspect we're missing something when we don't realize that human beings need some stamina and, and, and skills and, and ability and a and in a, a circumstance as well that that is conducive to using those skills. In a way that serves others and themselves.

Shelley Doyle: 51:36

One of the, one of the things that came up during my interviews was on fear. And of the leaders that I spoke to, um, the ones that felt very socially healthy or even socially wealthy, they were part of established groups and part of like different social groups, maybe sports clubs or whatever, but those that weren't really expressed a fear of joining a group of people that they didn't know. And I found, I found this quite interesting.

Corey Keyes: 52:10

Wow. Because I, I think that the old, the old adage, nothing ventured, nothing gained is, is very important there because it will be hit and miss, but you will, you have to go out and explore. I'm just thinking and, and in, in an admission of my own life, um, one blessing of accepting the fact that I'm an alcoholic is that I, I, and I had to confront that. Um, I have this amazing. Daily fellowship. That has been a, a blessing in that regard. Some of my deepest friendships now come from the fact that, uh, there are people that we have been in this, this setting where we share all these things, very personal things, and, and now we, we do things separately. We'll have coffee every Thursday, me and my buddies, and we will talk about these books, these amazing books and just, but that was a blessing in disguise. Yeah. Was that true? Alcoholic and Alcoholics Anonymous. I hear really

Shelley Doyle: 53:20

incredible things from others who have been through that journey. Like it is almost a rite of passage.

Corey Keyes: 53:26

Oh yeah. I'm just, I just picked up a book, um, seeking Wisdom by Julia Cameron, who is about, writes about spirituality and creativity as being inex in inextricably linked. Her whole journey started when she had to confront her alcoholism. It's a remarkable thing. Not every, it's not the, the pla birthplace for everyone for these connections. So that's not the way some approach it, but I thought, what an amazing thing. There are some people here when they talk, they share such interesting things. I want to go, I'm gonna seek them out. And there are people who will come up to me after I, I've shared things and we'll start talking. But I had to share something. I had to have a reason for being in that setting. We had to be on the same plane. The kind of equality Yes. That we Right. And we had to be facing our fears. We had to face our vulnerabilities. We had to face the things that reduced us to things that we didn't ever wanted and imagined we we would become. And yet out of that was the birthplace of deep connection.

Shelley Doyle: 54:42

Hmm.

Corey Keyes: 54:43

There's this book called Spirituality of Imperfection. It's written by people who have had to confront that, but that kind of fellowship there is the birthplace of some of the best connections I have right now.

Shelley Doyle: 54:57

And you say in your book, for real intimacy to form it has to be a two-way street. Mm. It must have a mutual sense of equality. Yeah. I see you. You belong here. We are the same. Yeah. And I write about

Corey Keyes: 55:11

this professor who did that when I was a college student, and he was a professor. And yet the way he treated me, I was equal. We respected our positions. We didn't have to operate out of them though entirely. That's why we connected and stayed connected throughout our lives because he saw me in him and I saw myself in him and vice versa, despite huge status differences. Mm-hmm. And every day we can do that. We need to stop operating as out of our positions in society as if, uh, that's the only person you are. Because a boss can treat a, an employee as equal in, in caring and, and because that's the mo, uh, as easily as anyone else. But you won't be able to if all you do is operate out of being a boss.

Shelley Doyle: 56:15

Mm. Well, I must say, inviting you on my podcast and you saying yes, it felt like a huge stretch for me, so I'm absolutely blown away and honored that you took your time and your beautiful dog has hung out with us as well. Is there anything that we haven't covered today, Corey, that's really present for you and that you feel that you would like to share today?

Corey Keyes: 56:44

I think in the, the spirit of the idea that what I shared about that, this couple of things that I think we're hearing too much about social disconnection is in terms of, uh, the amount matters and reclaiming connection is about having more, no, I think it's, we need to have more conversations about. What's the substrate, what's, what's really there underneath connection that really makes some connection so beautiful and meaningful and other connection. Vapid.

Shelley Doyle: 57:18

Hmm.

Corey Keyes: 57:18

The other is that I think we use the word we're social. Our social nature. As if it, as if that's the epitome of what we should be good at. And I think it's just the opposite. I think we got need to be kinder and both to ourselves and to others.'cause social connection's really messy. It can be very messy. Just look at your own loving love relationships. I have a wonderful marriage, but my God, it's like there are times when it's just bonkers and let's be honest with each other. It sometimes doesn't make sense and that. We recognize when we're, when there's rupture and disconnection and we attend to it, and that's what's beautiful about relationships that matter. They're hard, but you, they won't get better if you don't attend to the fact that a lot of school social connection has rupture and disconnection and it's there because that's what makes it meaningful. Working at it, repairing, saying, I'm sorry, having trust despite the fact that sometimes someone did something that made you feel like, oh, that I wish you had done that. And doing genuine apologies, not just like, I'm sorry, here's what I learned and I, I will, I understand this matters to you and I'm gonna be more careful about that because I care about you. So it's messy. We're social. Yes. But that doesn't mean we're really good at it. It is a skill and it takes work. And no, even the best relationships, my marriage, which oh my God, it's the best thing and, and it, besides my nana and papa that ever happened to me is I messy, messy affair. That's so beautiful. In the end, it's like finger painting when I was a kid. It's a fun, beautiful, messy thing. Just go in it and have fun.

Shelley Doyle: 59:25

Cory Keys, it has been such a great honor and privilege to have you here with me in this moment in time. So thank you so much. And I'm so excited to, uh, to be able to talk about your work, um, with a little bit more integrity that I, uh, I really know what you are doing and what and why. So yeah, thank you so much for this time and for sharing some of your insights.

Corey Keyes: 59:51

It's, it's been a pleasure. And, and thank you for having me