PODCAST · education
Good Life Project
by Jonathan Fields / Acast
Good Life Project is a podcast and video series for people navigating midlife with intention. Hosted by Jonathan Fields, each episode is a deep, honest conversation about what it actually takes to build a life that feels like yours, through the reinventions, reckonings, and reclamations that define your 40s, 50s, and beyond. Grounded in science, fueled by genuine curiosity, and always in service of the real work of living well. Often top-ranked, it’s been listened to and viewed more than 100 million times. New episodes weekly. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Episodes
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Harlan Coben: It's Never Too Late to Start Your Creative Life
Harlan Coben spent decades insisting his novels had nothing to do with his life. Then he went looking, and found his life inside every single one of them. With over 100 million books sold in forty-six languages and a run of number one Netflix hits including Fool Me Once, Missing You and I Will…
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Inflammation, Aging, & How to Put Out the Fires Your Body Keeps Setting | David Furman, PhD
Every year you get your blood drawn, and someone circles a number that supposedly tells you your inflammation level. Turns out that number is barely more accurate than a coin flip. But, knowing how chronically inflamed you are is critical in preventing disease and slowing the age clock. David...
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Jimmy Chin: The Cost of Risking Too Little
We spend a lot of time weighing the cost of risking too much. Jimmy Chin has spent most of his life on the harder question, which is what it costs to risk too little, quietly, for twenty or thirty years, until the years are gone. Jimmy Chin is an Academy Award-winning director, a National...
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The Social Fear That Keeps Us Lonely (and the easy fix) | Nicholas Epley
Nicholas Epley studies how people misjudge each other, avoid conversations with strangers, and miss out on life-affirming relationships. It all started when he noticed something on a silent Chicago train that changed how he thinks about the strangers he avoids and the people he loves but never...
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47 Doctors, Data Galore, and a Problem Only She Could Solve | Giorgia Lupi
She measured everything about her illness. The measuring turned out to be part of what kept her sick. Giorgia Lupi is an information designer and a partner at Pentagram in New York, and one of the few people alive who can take raw data and turn it into something you understand in your bones and...
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How 7 Core Beliefs Shape Your Health, Happiness, & Success | Shawn Achor
Shawn Achor spent twelve years at Harvard studying the science of belief and success, and his TED talk has been watched more than 25 million times. His new book, The Power of Beliefs, grew out of research with the NFL, NASA, and six Marine battalions at Camp Pendleton, and out of watching his own...
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Good Life Jam: Parenting Burdens & Self-Help Book Burials | Leah Smart
Today, we’re introducing a new conversation format that we’ll be working into the mix called Good Life Jams. These sessions take on 2-3 hot topics and go deep. Today’s conversation partner is Leah Smart, a senior editor at LinkedIn, a writer and speaker, and the host of Everyday Better. The…
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Getting Back Up After You’ve Been Brought to Your Knees | Mark Nepo
Martial artists spend years learning how to fall before they learn much of anything else. The rest of us just brace, then wonder why the landing does so much damage. This is a best-of conversation, first aired in 2023, and it has only gotten more useful with time. Mark Nepo is a poet and…
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He’s Spent 20 Years Trying to Change The World | Scott Harrison
Jonathan sits down with Scott Harrison, charity: water founder, for a wide-ranging reflection on his 20-year mission to bring clean water to everyone on earth. Scott revisits the original spark, the scale of the problem, the storytelling strategy that helped build the movement, and the personal...
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Sex in Midlife: It Doesn’t Have to Fade (and Can Even Be Great) | Susan Bratton
Susan Bratton has spent over two decades teaching people the passionate lovemaking and intimate communication skills that sex education (and life) never covered. At 42, after eleven years of marriage, she had never had an orgasm from intercourse, and her husband was already having an affair to…
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The Endings You Don’t See Coming (Until They’re Gone) | Jonathan Fields
Somewhere in the past few years, you did something you love, with someone you love, for the very last time. And you had no idea when it happened. This solo episode is about why we cruise through our most meaningful endings, and why that might actually be the best possible news about how you've…
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Jodi Picoult: Why Every Villain is the Hero of Their Own Story
Every villain is the hero of their own story. That line opens part two of Jodi Picoult's thirtieth novel, and she'll tell you it's also how most of us get through any given day, or life. Picoult is the number one New York Times bestselling author of thirty novels, including My Sister's Keeper,...
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Single at Heart: What if You Don't Need Someone Else to “Complete” You | Bella DePaulo, PhD
Bizarre fact, if you tell people you’re genuinely happy being single, they don’t believe you. You, in fact, may be among the doubters when it comes to your single-at-heart friends. Bella DePaulo has spent more than three decades studying what happens when someone is genuinely, unapologetically...
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The Midlife Curiosity Tour That Changed Everything | Allison Aubrey
Allison Aubrey walked into a longevity lab expecting a great story. She walked out believing she was failing at key parts of her own life. After 25 years as one of NPR's most trusted health and science reporters, Aubrey agreed to a battery of tests meant to measure her biological age, and the...
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Why Grit Alone Doesn’t Cut It: New Research From Angela Duckworth
Angela Duckworth on why grit is only half the story. Acclaimed researcher Professor Angela Duckworth returns to unpack a bigger idea behind grit: your environment matters as much, if not more, than your mindset. Jonathan and Angela Duckworth explore how situation, peers, mentors, and culture…
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How to Make Better Decisions | Shane Parrish [Best of]
Most of us think good decisions happen in the moment. Shane Parrish says they’re already decided before you sit down. And most of them end up being bad, because you waited too long to make them good. Shane Parrish spent years inside Canadian intelligence, making real-time decisions where the…
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Why Avoiding a Fight is Killing Your Relationship (and How to Fight Well) | Priya Parker
Priya Parker comes back to argue that the fights you're avoiding aren't threatening your closest relationships; they're the only thing that can save them. Priya Parker is a facilitator and strategic advisor who has spent two decades helping churches, companies, and families fight better, not…
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The Menopause Timeline Most Women Never Learn Until Midlife | Dr. Jessica Shepherd
Most women don't hear about perimenopause until they're already deep into it, sometimes a decade in. This week, guest host Karen Walrond talks with OB/GYN and Generation M author Dr. Jessica Shepherd about the actual, gradual shape of that transition, the real math behind hormone therapy…
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How to Avoid Cognitive Decline & Dementia (starting in your 40s) | Dr. Tommy Wood
Your brain does not have to decline with age. Recent research reveals that for most people, staving off cognitive decline or dementia is more about lifestyle, especially in your 30s to 50s, than age or genetics. And, amazingly, retirement might be the single biggest danger zone for your brain...
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Sleep Doesn't Have to Get Worse With Age | Dr. Rebecca Robbins
Every night, while you're asleep, your brain runs a cleaning cycle that clears out the kind of toxic buildup linked to Alzheimer's and dementia. And, with age, most of us sleep less. We are shortchanging the benefits without ever realizing how much control we actually have over sleeping longer…
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The Self-Care Trap: Why Doing Everything Right Often Isn’t Enough | Jonathan Fields
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...
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What 10-Year-Olds Know About Mental Health That the Rest of Us Forgot | Dr. Niobe Way
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...
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Not All Pain Has a Purpose | Marisa Renee Lee
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…
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Top Headache Doc: Migraine Is Not What You Think
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…
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Time Anxiety: Beating the Dread That You’ll Never Get Ahead | Chris Guillebeau
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...
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The 3 Things Every Room You Live In Must Have to Be Okay | Leidy Klotz
Most of us think the biggest decision about a room is whether it's functional. Leidy Klotz thinks that's the wrong question, and the right one changes how a desk, a kitchen, or an entire return-to-office policy actually lands on the person living inside it. Leidy Klotz is a behavioral scientist…
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How Much Money Is Enough? Your Confusing Money Questions Answered. | Leisa Peterson
By the age of 7, most of us have absorbed the rules that run our financial lives…forever. And almost none of us checked to see if they were true. Not the numbers. The rules. The slogans we heard around the kitchen table about what money means, who deserves it, and what it says about us if we…
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Tapping: Surprising Science Behind Healing Claims (and how to do it) | Jessica Ortner
Your body already knows you're stressed before your brain finishes the thought. That tightness in your chest before a hard conversation. The way your stomach drops before you walk into a room full of people. Logic doesn't reach it. Telling yourself you're fine doesn't touch it. What if you could...
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Why Plans Fail, and What To Do Instead | Midyear Reset Pt 2
Share your midlife reinvention story with us HERE. You have a plan for how to succeed in the second half of the year, how to “get back on track.” And a plan, it turns out, is the most sophisticated way to actually stand still while feeling like you're moving. This is Part 2 of a special two-part...
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Midyear Wake-Up Call | Part 1
You can hit every goal you set in January and still be running on empty in the parts of your life the list never thought to measure. That's not a failure story. That's a design flaw in the instrument most of us reach for at the midpoint of the year. Jonathan Fields has spent 14 years exploring…
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Healing Family Estrangement: What To Say, And What Never to Say.
Between 10 and 15 percent of mothers and 1 in 4 fathers are currently estranged from a child. If those numbers feel shocking, the harder truth might be this: most of the moves parents instinctively make once estrangement begins are the exact moves that keep the door shut. Dr. Joshua Coleman has...
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The Caregiving Conversation Everyone Postpones Until It's Too Late.
Here is something most people never see coming: the hardest part of caring for an aging parent is not the logistics. It is the grief. The grief for who your parent used to be, for the life you thought you would be living by now, and for the version of yourself that is quietly disappearing inside…
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When You Can't Stop Thinking About Something, Here's What To Do. | Donna Jackson Nakazawa
There is something your brain is spinning right now, that you may never have been given a name for or a way out of. The thought you keep replaying. The conversation you keep recasting. The reel that loads up again and again without resolution, making you feel worse each time and no closer to...
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Why More Choices Make You Less Happy | David Epstein
Most of us believe more options equals better outcomes. Research says no. In much of life, the opposite is true, and the gap between what we believe and what the data shows is one of the more quietly consequential misconceptions shaping how we live right now. David Epstein is the author of Range...
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The Toll of Generalized Resentment (and What to Do About It)
There is a feeling many people in midlife carry that does not have a name, a clear cause, or anyone to blame. It shows up when you have been the dependable one long enough that dependable starts to feel like a cage. Or when you have handled everything capably and walked away feeling hollowed…
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You Spent Years Acting Normal Inside a Life That Never Fit | Sari Botton
Gotta love a good midlife reinvention story, and today we’ve got a great one! Sari Botton built her career editing some of the most celebrated voices in American literary nonfiction. Then, in her mid-50s, she watched doors close in her face, turned down for jobs she was overqualified for, told by...
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The Midlife Muscle Loss Lie: How to Stay Strong at Any Age | Dr. Vonda Wright
According to Dr. Vonda Wright, almost everything we believe about aging and muscle loss is wrong. The research that told you to expect decline was built on populations where 70 percent of participants barely moved. Which means the trajectory most of us are bracing for is not biology. It is...
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The 4 Chemicals That Run Your Brain…and Your Life | Tj Power
Four chemicals, produced by your brain, serve as a master switch for nearly everything you think, do, and feel. In no small way, they also control our lives. But, all too often, instead of harnessing them to fuel amazing experiences and outcomes, we are controlled by them. Today, we learn how to...
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What Lucky People Do Differently, According to Science | Tina Seelig
Luck is not a personality trait you either have or you don't. It is something you build, and science tells us there are specific, learnable skills behind why some people consistently seem to be in the right place at the right time while others walk right past the same opportunities. Tina Seelig…
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Why Rituals Matter More Than You Know, And How to Design Your Own | Bruce Feiler
There is a particular kind of loneliness that hits in the middle of a full life. Not because you are isolated. Because the relationships that used to hold you steady are all being renegotiated at once. Your kids have left. A parent has died. A marriage needs new terms. A friendship has frayed.…
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Dating in Midlife…Oh My! | Bela Gandhi
Here is something most of us have never been told: falling in love was never supposed to be easy, and the fact that it hasn't been isn't a character flaw. It's a design problem. Your biology may be working against you. Your cultural programming works against you. But, more than anything, the list...
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Your Ambitions Might Not Be Yours | Tom Rath
Most of us reach our 40s and discover something unsettling: the ambitions we've been chasing weren't entirely ours. They came from parents, from culture, from the two or three careers we happened to see up close. Tom Rath calls this looking through a pinhole, and he thinks it explains more…
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Why Can’t Anyone Tell Me What’s Wrong? | Alexandra Sifferlin
Ever have something clearly wrong, and yet no expert can tell you what’s causing it? Or, worse, they DO tell you, but they’re wrong? Nearly everyone will experience at least one diagnostic error in their lifetime. Not a minor mix-up, but a missed, delayed, or wrong diagnosis that shapes how long...
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How to Finally Have the Talk You've Been Avoiding | Jonathan Fields
There is a conversation most of us are carrying right now. Not one we lack words for. We have plenty of those. One we keep finding reasons not to have. Not because we don't know what we'd say, but because we have become very skilled at building the case for staying quiet a little longer. Jonathan...
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Invisible Grief: How Hidden Loss Holds You Back (and how to release it) | Dr. Lucy Hone
There is a gap between where your life is and where you thought it would be. That gap has a name. It is grief. A kind of hidden, invisible grief. And most of us are walking around carrying it without ever calling it that, because we have been taught that grief belongs only to those who have lost...
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Your Life in One Word? This Could Change Everything | Erin Weed
Somewhere in the last few years, a lot of us started asking a version of the same question: who am I now, and what am I actually here to do? The answers don't come from a quiz or a vision board. But they just might come from the one word that has been running your life all along, whether you knew...
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The 5 Types of Overthinking and How to Turn Each One Off | Emiliya Zhivotovskaya [Best of]
The voice telling you that you're not enough, that something is about to go wrong, that you should have done it differently, it sounds like you. That's exactly what makes it so hard to catch and so hard to stop. Emiliya Zhivotovskaya has spent decades inside the science and practice of mental...
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The Hidden Reason You Keep Putting Things Off | Jon Acuff
What if procrastination has been working exactly as intended? Not as a character flaw, not as laziness, but as a solution you invented for a problem you were more afraid of than the thing you kept putting off. That reframe changes everything about how you approach it. Jon Acuff has spent decades...
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Your Childhood Patterns Are Still Running Your Life | Dr. Nicole LePera
The anxiety you carry, the way you go silent in conflict, the relentless drive that never quite feels like enough, these didn't start with you. They started much earlier, in relationships and environments your body learned to survive before you had words for any of it. And according to Dr. Nicole...
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You Probably Shouldn’t Say That. And Yet…(Groundbreaking Science of Disagreeing Well) | Julia Minson
Learn how to say what you think without blowing up your relationships. Most of us have been there. A conversation that starts completely normally and somehow ends with you lying awake at 2am wondering how it went so wrong, again. Whether it is a partner, a teenager, a colleague, or someone on the...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Good Life Project is a podcast and video series for people navigating midlife with intention. Hosted by Jonathan Fields, each episode is a deep, honest conversation about what it actually takes to build a life that feels like yours, through the reinventions, reckonings, and reclamations that define your 40s, 50s, and beyond. Grounded in science, fueled by genuine curiosity, and always in service of the real work of living well. Often top-ranked, it’s been listened to and viewed more than 100 million times. New episodes weekly. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
HOSTED BY
Jonathan Fields / Acast
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Good Life Project have?
Good Life Project currently has 1000 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Good Life Project about?
Good Life Project is a podcast and video series for people navigating midlife with intention. Hosted by Jonathan Fields, each episode is a deep, honest conversation about what it actually takes to build a life that feels like yours, through the reinventions, reckonings, and reclamations that define...
How often does Good Life Project release new episodes?
Good Life Project releases new episodes frequently with a large back catalog of 1000 episodes. Check the episode list for recent publication dates.
Where can I listen to Good Life Project?
You can listen to Good Life Project on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Good Life Project?
Good Life Project is created and hosted by Jonathan Fields / Acast.
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