What changes when wellbeing is treated as a dynamic system rather than a personal checklist? How can we measure flourishing without flattening out how a human life actually works? My guest in this episode, Dr. Peggy Kern, is a professor at the Centre for Wellbeing Science at the University of Melbourne’s Faculty of Education in Australia. Her research focuses on questions like these and draws on a variety of methodologies to examine who thrives in life and why, and what we can do about it.

In this episode I talk with Dr. Matthew Zawadzki, a health psychologist and professor of Psychological Sciences at the University of California, Merced. His work examines how everyday experiences shape our health and well-being. That includes stress, loneliness, and even the ways we spend our free time. One of the central questions in his research is why a stressful event can be over while our minds and bodies remain caught in it. He studies worry and rumination--the thoughts that keep stress active--and uses real-time methods to understand what happens as people move through ordinary life.

This episode's guest is Dr. Matthew Johnson. Since 2004, he's played a role in the revival of psychedelic research, publishing on psychedelics in relation to mystical experience, personality change, risk and safety, ethics, and the treatment of tobacco addiction, cancer distress, and depression. He's also known for his expertise in behavioral economics, addiction, sexual risk behavior, and research across a wide range of drugs and has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, NPR, Fox News, the BBC, and more.