Are You Living or Just on Autopilot? The Aliveness Audit and the Science of Vitality

So if it can't be measured, how would somebody even know where they are on vitality?

Yeah.

Let's get into the research sections here that will kind of walk us through some frameworks and kind of how we would frame this.

So we're going to walk through four areas, each a different face of vitality, and each one is taught by its absence.

Because absence is what you can actually detect in yourself when you're thinking about vitality.

And the state we're describing in this first area of research has a name in the research literature.

It's called languishing.

So if you look up the definition of languishing, if you just Google it, it means to suffer from a lack of energy, vitality, or progress, often while stuck in an unpleasant or neglected situation.

So this area of research is really, really interesting.

Corey Keys, a sociologist at Emory, published the paper that defined it in 2002 in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior.

So his argument was, that mental health is not just the absence of mental illness.

Those are two different axes.

You can have no diagnosable disorder and still have almost none of what he called positive functioning.

He called the top of that scale flourishing and the bottom of it languishing.

So this feels similar to... our physical health.

Just because I'm not sick doesn't mean I'm healthy and vibrant.

I might be in horrible physical shape, even though I don't have a sickness or I don't have a major disease.

Is that kind of what you're saying?

It's exactly that.

You can almost think of it as like two dials, right? Like one to 10 or scales, two different axes, right? As he said.

So, you know, you're going to have like a mental illness dial.

You can be at a zero and be mentally ill or be struggling with these things.

Or you can not have illness.

You can be at a 10.

But then the other axis is kind of what you're saying about being in shape or being fit, right? You can be languishing, as he described it, at the bottom of that, or flourishing.