Sociologist Dr. Corey Keys discusses his passion for mental health and explains the steps we can take to stop feeling down and start thriving instead.
Dr. Corey Keyes is a sociologist and professor at Emory University in Georgia. His pioneering work on mental health—specifically, mental health rather than mental illness—has had wide-ranging policy implications, including consulting for government agencies in Canada, Northern Ireland, and Australia.
Dr. Keys explains the concepts of „deterioration” and „growth,” the steps we can take to thrive, and his passion for researching and promoting mental health. He covers these ideas and more in his new book, Exhaustion: How to Feel Alive Again in a World That Beats Us Down It will be released on Thursday, February 22, 2024.
It's been described as feeling „blah” or „meh,” and when those terms are used, I don't think they do it justice. A couple of rainy days and a lack of sun are what many people mistake for feeling „blah.” It's a normal reaction to situations – regardless of whether life around you is good or not, fatigue is a constant state.
Burnout is a constant state that includes feelings of lack of purpose or belonging in society (Credit: Nathan Cowley (Bexcels))
My 14-item scale measures the presence of flourishing. Procrastination requires a score of at least seventh of the 14 items, where you rarely, if ever, feel things associated with prosperity. Thus, a hypothetical person who is fatigued may experience the following:
- They don't feel like they belong to a community
- They don't feel like they are contributing much to the world
- They dislike themselves or most parts of their personality
- They do not have loving or trusting relationships
- They don't feel challenged to become a better person or to grow
- They may say that they rarely, if ever, feel confident expressing their own ideas or opinions
- They may say that their lives have no meaning, direction, or purpose
What's really interesting is that people who are withering don't feel those good things, but they don't necessarily feel any negative emotions—they're stuck in the middle. The important thing about being bored is that you lack good things like purpose and belonging in your life. What I like to think about burnout is that you've either lost, or never had, many of the good things that make your life meaningful.
„Working is like being in a fog: you can't see all the good things in your life”
I described it to people as a mist; Suddenly, before you know it, a fog descends and you're engulfed in it, and you didn't see it coming. And then someone says, „Look at that, there,” and you say, „I can't see that.” You can't see all the good things in your life and you become emotionally drained. It's such a haunting feeling that you need to point it out in yourself and realize that you're living a life where you belong.
I've identified five activities that I talk about in my book that are essential for being prosperous, or (for those who are down or depressed) moving toward prosperity—I call them the Five Vitamins.
Dr. Corey Keys recommends five activities, which he calls five „vitamins,” that you can start to thrive in (Credit: Anna Schwetz (Bexcels))
The first activity seems pretty easy, but resourceful people learn something new on a more regular basis. There is a lot of fatigue among teenagers and university students, because they learn something every day, but they have to: we have designed it as a job. When that's the mindset, you're blocking the joy and meaning of learning something new and developing yourself, which should be the most meaningful thing.
The second function is to create loving and trusting relationships, develop a sense of belonging that thrives on, and create (or recreate) a community that allows you to indulge in these five vitamins. Fatigue increases in later life: it is highest in adolescence, then it decreases until the age of 70, when suddenly it „booms”. Loneliness is a big epidemic at the moment, and it's part of burnout, but it's also one of the 11 problems caused by burnout.
„Fatigue increases in adolescence and later life”
I call the third act „increase” because it is a whole set of spiritual and religious activities. If you are not spiritually or religiously inclined, there are many philosophies that do and can do what religion has done for you in guiding you as to what is the right way to be a person in this world. Things like meditation and focusing on gratitude can help manage your stress, but you need to take action to give your life purpose and thrive.
Fourth is living your purpose. Flourishers engage in helping behavior more often than degenerates: they invest in helping others or helping something. They may even make it a life's purpose from helping and volunteering; So, they live their purpose, which is to find a way to find something in the universe that helps them feel important to their community.
Helping others, including volunteering, can help people feel a greater sense of purpose (Credit: RDNE Stock Project (Pexels))
The last activity is to re-engage your imagination through play. As an adult in this life, we need to reclaim that sense of imagination and spend time without worrying about other responsibilities – just having fun for fun's sake. But the other part is that many of us engage in passive entertainment where we sit and consume the music and stories that are presented to us. They're great and entertaining, but I think we've forgotten how to create and share our own stories like we did a century ago. This active leisure is really important—get outside and engage in activities that you find creative and enjoyable.
There are a total of 14 symptoms, three of which are related to emotional well-being: happiness, satisfaction with life, and interest in life. There are five signs of social well-being:
- Social Contribution: You feel you can contribute positively to society
- Social Integration: You feel like you belong to a community
- Social coherence: You can understand what is happening in the world around you
- Social acceptance: acceptance of others
- Community Development: You feel part of a community that excels
Finally, there are six signs of psychological well-being: self-acceptance, positive relationships with others, a sense of personal growth, a sense of autonomy, a sense of purpose in life, and environmental mastery (being able to manage your responsibilities in your life).
Feeling part of a community and accepting others are two criteria for prosperity (Credit: Helena Lopes (Bexcels))
„Purpose in life” and „social contribution” are two traits that actually decline in later life, and there is a decline in personal development and feelings of belonging to society; As I say in the book, loneliness doesn't happen alone.
I have always been passionate about mental illness, and write a good deal in the book about how my own story of mental illness and recovery from mental illness led me down this path. I realized that there is no cure or cure for mental illness: we can manage it, but drugs can't do anything to put this Humpty Dumpty back together. We wait for people to break down and then we respond and think we can fix them, but we can't.
I wanted a better way to solve this mental illness problem in the world, which was my original motivation for studying psychiatry; I had the idea that if we promoted good things, we could prevent things we didn't like, like mental illness. When I started as a graduate student, there was no scale available to measure what I wanted to measure, which was the presence of mental health. Mental health was an invisible, empty category because we defined it then (as we do now) as the absence of mental illness. But that's not it!
„We define mental health as the absence of mental illness, but it isn't”
There are millions of people in this world without mental illness, but they are withering away. Fatigue means not feeling well. We have shown that physically unhealthy habits lead to physical illness, and mental health and exhaustion lead to mental illness. Fatigue produces very bad effects: we have to start getting tired because it is a gateway to all kinds of other problems that we cannot fix.
I think the challenge of mental illness is our backwardness: we can't manipulate our way out of this problem. Why would you let something so valuable that you can't stop it be broken beyond repair? We have a better way to approach the problem of mental illness, and that is to start promoting mental health by helping people grow, as it prevents mental illness.
Cover Fatigue: How to Be Alive Again in a World That's Letting Us Down By Corey Keys (Credit: Torva (Penguin Random House))
Fatigue: How to Be Alive Again in a World That's Letting Us Down Presented by Dr Corey Keyes will be published by Torva in the UK on Thursday 22 February 2024—you can pre-order it as a hardback, ebook or audiobook from £9.99. Here
Banner photo: Corey Keys teaches us how to stop being tired and start thriving (Credit: Corey Keys and Penguin Random House)
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