Cortland Dahl: Born to Flourish – The Four Skills That Unlock a Life of Well-Being

Your book paints a rather distressing picture of our current mental health crisis, rising depression, loneliness, distractibility, and even declining life expectancy in parts of the United States.

So your point is that a lot of us are not flourishing in our lives.

And this has been a steady conversation for us over the last six, seven months.

But your book delivers a deeply hopeful message that we're all born with an innate capacity to flourish.

which I loved.

So start out there, tell us about the causes of this crisis and how pervasive it is, and then maybe tip into your optimism.

Sure.

Well, I'm sure everybody listening has some version of a story or some connection point that highlights how dire the state of our mental health is.

I could share all sorts of statistics, but it's really staggering the scale of the anxiety, depression, attention-related disorders, toxic levels of loneliness.

And you could just go down the list and the number of people who are suffering from these things is just astronomical.

And that's, I mean, usually the statistics are showing clinically diagnosed levels of things like depression and anxiety.

But if you look beyond that, to people who maybe don't have a clinical diagnosis, but are just burnt out, stressed out, feeling isolated, and so on.

It's just really kind of staggering.

I mean, it dwarfs the numbers we saw, for example, from the COVID pandemic and the coronavirus, just in terms of the scale of it.

That is something

I've never heard before.

I think we all have some understanding of why this is happening, but I think you're probably going to be more informed, so do take a moment.

Yeah, so, I mean, the causes are complex.

I mean, mental health is complex.

The mind and our inner emotional life is complex.

There are many things that influence it, everything from our genetic heritage to our environment.

I think the missing, the blind spot has been... our inner world and the degree to which we have some agency over what's going on in our inner world of our thoughts, our emotions, our attention.

But just to say a little bit about the causes, I'm not going to blow anybody's mind by saying that the fact that we carry these devices around in our hands and on our wrists and are so glued to them is certainly one of the contributing factors.

What we consume through these devices obviously has a huge influence on our mental health.

The way I like to think about it is that information is to our mind what food is to our body.