Mental health isn’t just about avoiding illness—it’s about learning how to thrive. In this episode, mental health researcher Dr Matthew Iasiello explains the “dual-continuum” model: a framework that sees mental illness and well-being as distinct but connected. With insights from his podcast Researching Happy and his work at SAHMRI and Be Well Co, Matt joins Zoe to unpack the idea of languishing, why we need better ways to measure well-being, and how culture shapes our mental health.

Zoe Booth: So Matt, everyone is talking about mental health at the moment. We’re obsessed with mental health. But what really is mental health? How do we define that?

Matt Iasiello: It’s a really good question, and that’s an active part of our research—getting to the bottom of what we actually mean by mental health. At the moment, so often when you see “mental health,” it’s really mental illness that people are talking about. For a long time, there’s been this assumption that when you say mental health, you mean mental illness. As a result, we’ve overlooked the positive sides of our mental health. What does it actually mean to live a good life?

There’s been an emerging field in the last twenty years or more—based on years of research and even ancient Greek philosophy—asking: What does it mean to live a good life? That’s become quite formalised and empirical, as people have been collecting data on how we measure wellbeing, how we define it, and how we improve it.

ZB: So are there different definitions depending on the school of thought?

MI: Absolutely, yeah. There are lots of issues. I don’t know how many academics you’ve met—a lot, probably—they don’t often agree. They often assume their approach is the right and only one. Over the years, people have come up with different models of what they mean by wellbeing. We don’t even agree on what to call it: well-being with a hyphen, wellbeing without a hyphen, wellness, positive mental health, mental wellbeing.

What I generally mean by mental wellbeing—these are all essentially synonyms—but there are different philosophies around it, and different disciplines involved in this work ... They also measure what they mean by wellbeing differently. In a medical or physical health environment, wellbeing is often equated with quality of life—how well you’re functioning, whether you’re able to do what you want to do in a day. From a philosophical background, there are different ideas about what it means to live a good life—whether it’s about enjoyment and pleasure (hedonic wellbeing) or about virtue and character development (eudaimonic wellbeing). So it gets pretty messy, pretty quickly.

ZB: Yeah, because it seems quite subjective, right? My idea of a good life could be different from someone else’s. For example, there are people who, by all accounts, are successful and rich, with incredible lifestyles—they travel, they have beautiful clothes—but they’re not happy. Whereas I’ve heard that the World Happiness Index often shows higher happiness in countries that are less developed and where people have less money. Do you have any comments?

MI: Yeah, again, it comes down to what it is you’re actually measuring. This is where it gets complicated. When you ask what a good life is, you have to define what “good” means.

ZB: Complicated, yeah.

MI: So if your standard of good is material wealth, that’s a totally different outlook on happiness compared to measuring it by warm, trusting relationships, a sense of autonomy, or a sense of purpose. These things are quite different, although sometimes they do overlap.

There’s an entire field around this. I’m about to speak to someone on my podcast about the Easterlin Paradox. Have you heard of it?

ZB: Easterlin—yeah.

MI: It’s named after someone who just passed away, a giant in the field. The paradox is this: As average income goes up in a country, happiness increases—up to a certain point, so the question is, what’s the story there?

ZB: So, Be Well Co is the company you work at. You’ve just done some really interesting research on languishing. Just the name alone is interesting—it’s not a word we use all the time. Could you tell us a little bit about what languishing is?

MI: Yeah, I’ll walk you through it. I can also go through our work defining mental health—whatever you think is best.

ZB: Whatever you think is best. Maybe let’s start with defining mental health.

MI: All right, cool.

So the issue with mental health—as we’ve said—is that it’s defined so poorly. It’s a personal frustration for me that you walk through the supermarket and see “wellbeing” plastered everywhere. It’s on tissue boxes, on yoghurt—“take this supplement to improve your wellbeing, only $12.99!” So where’s my money best spent for my wellbeing, right?

That starts with the academic world, because we don’t even agree amongst ourselves on what wellbeing actually means. So anyone can just pick up the language and use it however they like.

We set out on a series of projects to get to the bottom of whether we could reach a consensus on what we mean by wellbeing. We pulled together a team of academics from around the world—some from Australia, some from the US, and Dorota [Weziak-Bialowolska], who’s at Harvard but currently in Poland. A great team of people with different perspectives on wellbeing: clinical psychologists, economists, sociologists, public health experts, and measurement economists.

Our first study—interrupt me if I’m going too fast—was a review of what’s already out there in terms of wellbeing measurement.

We looked at how the WHO defines mental wellbeing—they describe it as multi-dimensional. A state of wellbeing that includes this and this and that. It draws from the wellbeing space, the quality of life literature, and ideas like resilience and coping—being able to manage adversity.

So we did a broad review of wellbeing measures, resilience literature, and quality of life literature to see what they actually include. Long story short, we found 155 different survey tools. That’s already too many—how do you choose the right one?

But more to the point, those 155 tools claimed to measure 400 different things. Are there really 400 aspects we need to work on for our wellbeing? Hopefully not.

We started synthesising the data—some measures referred to energy, others to vitality, but when you look closely, they’re basically the same. So we reduced it down to a set of 21. We mapped those back to their sources.

What the diagram shows is that concepts like meaning and purpose were just as common in wellbeing literature as they were in quality of life and resilience literature. The things in the middle—positive emotion, autonomy, optimism, community, meaning and purpose, self-acceptance—were very consistently measured across all three fields.

But each field introduced other unique elements. Quality of life focused more on physical health and personal circumstances. Resilience and coping brought in calmness, and coping styles like avoidance-focused and problem-focused coping.

So this was our starting point—a map of everything out there. We weren’t saying what’s in or out, but we wanted to show what exists.

That led us to the next study. Skipping some detail, but the key bit is we ran what’s called a Delphi study. That’s where you bring together a panel of experts and invite them to vote on a topic. The goal is academic consensus.

We used findings from our first and second studies (too much detail to get into) to present a set of dimensions of positive mental health to the panel. We asked: Are these essential, important, peripheral, or irrelevant?

We invited 150 experts across eleven disciplines—quite large for a Delphi study. They were from all over the world, and the most cited academics in each field.

The group was highly experienced—most had worked in the field for over ten years, many between ten and forty years. On average, participants had 12,000 academic citations, which is a decent indicator of how influential their work is.

The Delphi process goes over three rounds. In round one, we asked whether the 26 dimensions we identified were “in or out”. If 75 percent agreed, it was in. Anything less moved to round two. They also had the chance to suggest new dimensions we might have missed.

Over those rounds, we ended up with a set of nineteen dimensions—similar to where we started, but with some key differences. We clustered these into four themes:

1. How satisfied you are with your life;
2. How satisfied you are with yourself;
3. How good you’re feeling;

How well you’re functioning.

ZB: These categories are all quite similar, aren’t they? Feeling good might be more—yeah, as it says here—like happiness, vitality, calmness. “Functioning well”—I would’ve read that more as physical functioning.

MI: That’s right, yeah. It’s very much about how you’re functioning in a mental capacity. So, wanting to feel engaged with your life, to feel competent—meaning you can achieve the goals you set out to do—to have a sense of meaning and purpose, to have warm and trusting relationships. Those sorts of things.

ZB: Cool.

MI: What we’re trying to do here is get some agreement on what the puzzle pieces are. Obviously, you don’t need to be ten out of ten on all of these dimensions to feel well. This is where your first comment comes in—around an individual’s value system. You might value some of these things more than others. In my opinion, I think you feel well when you’re satisfied with the things you personally care about.

ZB: Judging by your own standard.

MI: Exactly. That’s hopefully the next direction for us. We were really fortunate that this work was funded by the Department of Health in Victoria. It’s going to inform a lot of their policy going forward because they’re very focused as a state on promoting the mental wellbeing of their people—which, frankly, is enviable for other states around Australia and even internationally. The idea of having a clearer roadmap is really exciting.

ZB: Pulling on that thread a little—why do you think it’s important for states or governments to care about how we’re feeling?

MI: Well, that takes us straight to the languishing question. The idea is that low levels of wellbeing—low levels of the dimensions we’re talking about—come with significant costs. These costs are not necessarily the same as those associated with mental illness rates in a population.

ZB: Yeah, great. Because I think we all understand why society would be concerned about rates of schizophrenia, for example, or depression or anger issues. But I think a lot of people might wonder, why should I care if the guy down the road is just feeling a bit “meh” about life?

MI: Sure, and that’s an interesting one. It comes with costs if you don’t have wellbeing—but it’s also valuable in its own right. Feeling good, feeling well, having a sense of optimism and life satisfaction—these are intrinsically worthwhile. We should want citizens who feel this way.

The other side is the cost side. People with low wellbeing are at greater risk of future mental illness, greater risk of physical illness, they use health services more often, they’re less productive at work—there’s a whole world of consequences. It just depends on what argument you find most compelling.

MI: Here’s the full definition the group came to, if you’d like me to read it?

ZB: Yes, let’s do that.

MI: So, we also got the Delphi panel to vote on a definition that we had been working on, along with Beyond Blue in Australia. It came from a big review of how people were defining mental wellbeing. We also got them to vote on what we should even call it—positive mental health, wellness, and so on. They landed on “positive mental health.” Here’s how we defined it:

Positive mental health is a personal and subjective experience where we are content with our lives, we feel good, function well and view ourselves favourably. Our level of positive mental health may vary over time and is influenced by the way we adapt to the problems and opportunities that we face. It is impacted by many factors such as our environment, life experiences, cultural background, biology, and behaviours. Many people have some level of positive mental health, and we can improve it by taking action using a variety of means—even when we experience a mental health condition.

ZB: Pretty concise, yeah.

MI: Thank you. You have to be pretty brave, I think, to give a definition to 100 experts and say, “What do you think?” They let you know, and it’s improved drastically as a result. That was a great process.

ZB: So when we talk about languishing—can we go into that in more detail?

MI: Yeah, absolutely. When we talk about languishing, we’re talking about a kind of “blah” feeling. That’s how Adam Grant described it in the New York Times—his article was the most read piece of 2021, which tells you something, given what that year was like.

ZB: Exactly—so much languishing.

MI: Right. Grant described it as this feeling of blah, and people really resonated with that. Especially those in lockdowns, or who couldn’t live the life they’d planned. Stepping back, we define languishing as having a low level of wellbeing without having a diagnosed mental illness. It’s this middle ground between flourishing and mental illness.

Our mission is to shine a light on languishing because it comes with significant costs, but also because people in this state just fly under the radar. They can languish for a long time before showing up in any systems. From a proactive standpoint, that’s a huge opportunity—to reduce future illness, reduce costs, and help people live better lives.

ZB: That really aligns with Quillette’s values—around human flourishing. Speaking personally, if I can feel better or do better, why not attempt to improve?

MI: Yes, absolutely. There’s always an ongoing discussion: Should improvement come from the individual or from the environment? I think the answer is both. Academics will always debate that. But essentially...

ZB: That’s interesting—we need to reframe how we think about mental health. There is no single mental health spectrum.

MI: Exactly. That was the subject of my whole PhD. The prevailing approach has been to think of mental health as a spectrum—from mental disorder through languishing, up to flourishing. This comes from Felicia Huppert, who sadly passed away this year. She was based in Sydney.

The idea is: If you imagine a normal curve of how wellbeing is distributed in the population, if you can shift that curve a bit to the right, toward flourishing, you reduce the number of people in the mental disorder category. Roughly twenty percent of the population is in that clinical space; the rest are in the non-clinical space. So clinicians focus on that twenty percent, and the rest is left to wellbeing professionals.

But here’s the problem: this model assumes mental illness and mental health are on the same spectrum. It suggests you move from negative ten (disorder) to positive ten (flourishing). And that’s not accurate.

ZB: Are you saying you can be mentally ill but still have a good sense of wellbeing?

MI: Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying. That’s where the dual-continuum model comes in. It’s based on the work of Professor Corey Keyes—he coined the term “languishing” and was the focus of that Adam Grant article.

He proposed that we shouldn’t see mental illness and mental wellbeing as opposite ends of the same continuum, but as two separate ones. You can have high or low wellbeing, and high or low mental illness severity. That creates four quadrants.

For instance, someone could have high wellbeing while managing a mental illness. Or someone might have low wellbeing without any diagnosable condition—that’s the languishing group. There’s strong evidence for this model, especially in workplaces, where 5–10 percent of employees fall into that high wellbeing plus mental illness category. That doesn’t make sense on the single-continuum model.

ZB: What do you mean by “lived experience”? That term kind of triggers me.

MI: Yeah, it can be misused. Here, I’m referring to the experience of those with mental illness. Their stories often reflect a dual-continuum understanding more than a single spectrum. There’s this idea of clinical versus personal recovery. Clinical recovery is when a clinician tells you you’re no longer ill. Personal recovery is when the individual defines what recovery looks like for them.

They often talk about things like connection, hope, identity, meaning, and empowerment—the CHIME model.

ZB: Is addiction classed as a mental illness?

MI: It often is, yes. I’m not focusing on addiction here, but it’s frequently included under the broader umbrella of mental illness.

ZB: That part about how someone can be technically mentally ill but still experience wellness—that’s really interesting.

MI: Yeah, and it’s still a debated topic. For depression in particular, it can look like a single continuum. Some people really struggle with the idea that someone with deep depression could feel well. But we’re not saying someone with a mental illness feels well at all times. It’s about the timeframe. In the middle of a depressive episode, no, you might not feel you have purpose. But over a week or two, you might have moments where you do.

ZB: Isn’t it also true that people with depression might actually spend more time happy than they think? But they don’t notice it because their mood clouds their perception?

MI: Exactly. That’s a big part of it. That’s why this is an exciting place to work—because these are still live questions. We have colleagues in the Netherlands doing EMA—Ecological Momentary Assessment—where you ping someone randomly during the day and ask how they’re feeling.

MI: Even in those in-the-moment analyses, there’s still support for the dual-continuum model. But perspective plays a huge role, as you said. That clouds the measurement, especially since all our tools are self-reported. If your perspective is clouded, it affects the data.

ZB: That’s the word I was looking for—perspective.

MI: Exactly. There’s not much more to say about that, except that it’s an issue with all studies relying on self-report. We’re trying to improve those tools.

MI: Coming back to languishing—what’s critical for us is this group of people with low wellbeing and no mental illness. We jokingly use a ninja emoji to describe them because they’re hidden—yet they make up nearly twenty percent of the population in our workplace data.

ZB: Yeah.

MI: We recently published a characterisation of this group. And when you see the data, they feel very familiar—you probably know someone in this category, or maybe you are one of them. It’s about twenty percent of the population, and we see similar rates in other countries too.

We care about this group because wellbeing is valuable in itself, but also because they’re 4–8 times more likely to develop a future mental illness. And we can reduce that risk by improving their wellbeing.

When we analysed this group, the thing that really stood out was social wellbeing. People who are languishing report much lower satisfaction with their social lives. They feel they don’t contribute to society, don’t belong, and don’t believe society is a good place.

MI: So my challenge to Quillette is that these are all cultural issues. There are things that public health, government, and psychology can do to improve them, but in my opinion, these are cultural phenomena.

You see huge differences. I think your parents are probably about the same age as mine, and they’d say, “In my day, we played on the streets until the lights came on,” and the whole neighbourhood would be full of people. Now, neighbourhoods are deserted. Everyone’s inside. These are rapid, massive shifts in the way we conduct ourselves.

ZB: Yeah, from what I hear about the past, there’s definitely been a big change—especially for children. Jonathan Haidt, who I know we both appreciate, and Jean Twenge, they’ve done so much work on this, some of which Quillette has published, about how drastically children’s lives have changed. I don’t think you’ve studied children specifically—you’ve looked at adults—but even for my generation, I think I’m on the cusp, born in 1995.

I grew up in this new world of technology and social media, not interacting so much with my local community, but more with online communities halfway around the world. Technology has definitely changed our lifestyles—and I’m sure it’s not just that, but a whole combination of things.

MI: Yeah, and to me that’s still a big question. There’s often a bias when looking back—we tend to idealise the past. But there was plenty of languishing and misery then too. Still, I think it raises the question: What are the cultural levers we could pull to promote mental wellbeing? Because it’s not just psychological or physical.

This is where we see a stark difference between languishers and flourishers—those with high levels of wellbeing.

ZB: So those are on the same axis?

MI: Exactly. To make it easier to interpret, we looked at what percentage of languishers versus flourishers said they never feel certain ways. We used the Mental Health Continuum–Short Form by Corey Keyes, and we asked how frequently people felt specific aspects of wellbeing.

There are three areas where we saw huge differences. For example, nearly thirty percent of people who are languishing said they never or rarely feel that society is a good place or is becoming a better place. That’s huge. And it’s directly in Quillette territory.

ZB: One hundred percent. And I think a lot of people are familiar with the term “black pill”—this idea from internet culture that you see the truth of the world, and the truth is bleak. It’s very topical.

MI: Right. You go down the line and see things like 20–23 percent of languishers saying they never feel that society makes sense to them, or that they have anything important to contribute to society. That they belong to a community. These are major indicators of suffering.

ZB: So why should we care about languishing? Because it is a form of suffering.

MI: Exactly. And when you look further, eleven percent of languishers say they never feel like their life has a sense of direction or meaning. That’s suffering. People saying, “I don’t feel confident expressing my ideas or opinions”—it’s a big issue. I think Quillette has addressed many of these topics, which is why it’s such a pleasure to have this conversation.

ZB: Because people who do have a good sense of where they stand in the world, who feel the world is good, are much less likely to... I mean, I don’t want to imply that languishers are dangerous or anything, but when you read manifestos from people involved in extreme events, like some recent attacks in the US, those kinds of hopeless sentiments often appear—“The world is a terrible place, I don’t belong, I have nothing to contribute.”

MI: Yeah, definitely not suggesting that languishers are violent or dangerous. But it is important to recognise that people who feel this way—whether or not they have a diagnosed mental illness—are still part of society. Our data includes over 16,000 Australians, most of it gathered in workplaces and universities.

ZB: What kind of workplaces? Were they mostly professionals?

MI: A broad range, but probably skewed towards working professionals, yes.

ZB: I wonder sometimes whether more intelligent or more intellectual people are more prone to suffering mentally?

MI: I don’t think we’re in a position to say that. What we’re doing is identifying where people are. The why is the hard question. And that’s the challenge I’m putting to Quillette, because it’s not an easy one for researchers to answer—but it’s an important one to ask.

ZB: It would be fascinating to track rates of languishing decade by decade, and map them to cultural changes. But it sounds like this is a relatively new field?

MI: Yeah, Corey Keyes started it about twenty years ago, but it really entered the mainstream with Adam Grant’s article in 2021. And a lot of academics talk about the pandemic as the “wellbeing experiment nobody asked for”—suddenly everyone was forced to confront their own levels of wellbeing.

MI: You think about how quickly our sense of autonomy disappeared during lockdown. That sort of attention to wellbeing has really accelerated since then.

ZB: So, what do we do about wellbeing? That’s the next question.

MI: That’s where the other side of our work comes in. What can we do to promote wellbeing? Languishing is a real issue, but what do we do about it? Of course, there are cultural, economic, and environmental factors at play—but there are psychological drivers too. That’s where we focus.

We take a very pragmatic, applied approach. We can’t do much about poverty or interest rates, but we can translate psychological evidence into programmes that communities can use.

ZB: That makes sense.

MI: We’ve done a lot of systematic reviewing—reading through thousands of studies to see what’s been tried and what works. Our meta-analysis was published in Nature Human Behaviour. We reviewed 20,000 papers over a couple of years to find out which psychological interventions improve wellbeing.

We looked at interventions like acceptance and commitment therapy, compassion-based methods, cognitive-based therapies, expressive writing, mindfulness, positive psychology, and reminiscence. We assessed how effective each was for the general population, for people with mental illness, and for people with physical illness.

The results are shown in a forest plot—when a dot and its error bars touch the central line, it means no effect. The further away the dot is, the greater the effect. The larger the dot, the more participants it included, so we’re more confident in the result.

ZB: Thanks for explaining—I only did general maths!

MI: No problem! I hope it’s not coming across as mansplaining.

ZB: How dare you! (laughs)

MI: (laughs) The takeaway is: if a result gets to 0.2 or higher, we can confidently say it improves wellbeing. Anything below that—there may have been an effect, but it’s not strong enough. And yes, interventions can sometimes have negative effects, although we didn’t see much of that in our analysis.

ZB: That’s interesting, especially given the anti-therapy sentiment that’s emerged—this idea that therapy might do more harm than good.

MI: We didn’t see much harm, but it’s worth noting that our results are at the group level. We can’t detect individual harm in this data. But one big finding was about CBT—cognitive behavioural therapy. In the general population, CBT didn’t significantly improve wellbeing. It did help in populations with mental illness. So if your goal is improving wellbeing—not preventing illness—CBT may not be the best tool in non-clinical groups.

ZB: And languishers are in that general population?

MI: Exactly, yes. This classification depends on where the study participants came from—whether they were accessing services or not.

ZB: Okay. That’s interesting—I always thought CBT was the gold standard.

MI: It is effective, especially for treating symptoms of illness. But we want to move towards more tailored approaches for wellbeing—recommendations that actually match the needs of specific groups.

ZB: Like a wellbeing “personal trainer.”

MI: Exactly! That’s the analogy we use. At a gym, a trainer helps you figure out what you want to work on and what fits your lifestyle. We’re applying that same logic to psychological skills in a group setting. Over five weeks, people explore different activities, see what works for them, and try to form real habits.

ZB: One of my questions was: How do you even get languishers to know that they’re languishing?

MI: Great question. I’m not sure. I think many of them do know, because languishing is its own form of suffering. But it’s subtler—easier to distract yourself from. That’s why Adam Grant’s “blah” framing resonated. People said, “That’s how I feel.” Corey Keyes calls it “ghosting through life.”

ZB: That’s such a good metaphor. I love that emoji—the melting face one. Hard to explain, but it says so much.

MI: Yeah, my wife and her mum friends use it often. It captures that sense of “I’m doing okay, but this is hard.” So yes, in an ideal future, we’d have tools to detect languishing better—even at a GP visit. The diagnostic criteria don’t currently capture it. So we want to expand the kinds of questions we ask.

ZB: And having that word in the zeitgeist helps—it raises awareness.

MI: Absolutely. That’s actually how we’re approaching things at Be Well Co. We spun out of Samary because funding in this area is hard to get. So we became a company, offering services that also fund our research. We were recently acquired, and the marketing team who came with that acquisition said, “This is a brand awareness problem.”

MI: We’d been promoting flourishing—how good it is to feel well—but marketers pointed out that sounds like a luxury. Flipping the script to focus on languishing as a serious problem engages people much more.

ZB: Totally. We’re constantly bombarded with “feel good” messages—tissue boxes, yoga, supplements—but we rarely hear about the cost of not flourishing. People might even think, “Do I deserve to feel better?”

MI: There’s a researcher in South Korea, Mo Shin Joshin Lee, who studies “fear of happiness”—exactly what you’re describing. Cultural differences in how people respond to the idea of flourishing are massive.

ZB: Were there any sex differences? More female or male languishers?

MI: It was quite flat across gender. But there were big differences by age. Traditionally, happiness followed a U-shape: people were happy when young, dipped in middle age, then got happier again later in life. But now, younger people are less happy, and the curve is flattening—or even slanting downward.

ZB: That makes sense. I’m emerging from that 25–35 range, and I can see why people in it are struggling. Housing, job security, financial stress—culturally, the world feels pretty unstable.

MI: Yes, and we’re also just swamped with information.

ZB: The Belgian philosopher Maarten Boudry—who writes for Quillette—wrote The Seven Laws of Pessimism. One of his points is that we’re constantly exposed to negative news. You’re in Sydney and hear about a bombing in Uganda—it chips away at you. That’s exactly how I feel. It’s like your emotional energy gets drained little by little. We carry all this global suffering in our pockets.

The Seven Laws of Pessimism

If life is better than ever before, why does the world seem so depressing?

QuilletteMaarten Boudry

MI: Right—and it’s not imagined suffering. These are real problems. Yes, perception and perspective matter, but the challenges themselves are often very real—especially for young Australians trying to buy a home, for example.

ZB: I know you’re not here to give advice, but if someone is languishing—or knows someone who is—what could they do?

MI: There’s a great report that my colleague Laura Lowe and I wrote for Beyond Blue called A Guide to What Works for Mental Wellbeing. It’s a user-friendly version of our systematic reviews, with a thumbs-up rating system.

MI: There are eight interventions that earned three thumbs up—meaning we’re very confident they’re effective for improving wellbeing. They’re often low-cost and widely accessible. They include:

• Social prescribing interventions (getting out and being social)
• Art interventions
• Acceptance and commitment therapy
• CBT (primarily in clinical contexts)
• Mindfulness-based interventions
• Positive psychology interventions
• Reminiscence interventions
• Physical activity

ZB: That first and last one—social interaction and physical activity—really resonate with me. They help so much. But I’m intrigued by the art intervention—what does that look like?

MI: It’s really about being intentionally creative. In our utilitarian mindset, creativity often gets deprioritised. But it’s so valuable. One of our campaigns is called “Meaningful Pictures”—we ask people to go through their phone and find something in their recent photos that supports their mental health.

MI: It’s often surprising. People find social moments, creative hobbies—things that matter. And they realise they’ve been treating these like luxuries, when really, they’re essentials. That shift in perspective is powerful.

ZB: That’s great. I hope we get to a point where there are more flourishers than languishers. If people want to learn more, where should they go?

MI: Check out our website—bewellco.io. I’m also on LinkedIn. And I have a podcast called Researching Happy, where I chat with other academics about these issues.

ZB: Highly recommend it—very interesting. Thanks so much for joining me today, Matt.

MI: Thank you.