Better Life Lab Podcast: The Art and Science of Living a Full Life

Listen to the Better Life Lab podcast on iTunes.

Americans work among the longest hours of any advanced economy, take the least amount of vacation, are among the most anxious, and have among the fewest public policies and workplace practices to help people combine work and life in meaningful ways. Though we’re obsessed with productivity, life hacks, and innovation, people report feeling disengaged or burned out at work, frazzled by work-life conflict, lonely or disconnected from friends, and that they don’t have enough time to do the things they need, much less want, to do. Research has shown that the way Americans work – intense and long hours, work-life conflict, unpredictable workloads and schedules – creates so much stress that the workplace itself has now become a leading cause of ill health and even death. As technology has enabled work to spill into evening and weekend hours, many Americans feel they don’t have enough time for family, themselves, or the things that make life worth living.

There has to be a better way. What is The Good Life in the 21st century, and how can all people live it? Our mission is to find out.

On the Better Life Lab podcast, we explore the art and science of living a full and healthy life. The podcast combines the power of storytelling - people sharing their own very real struggles, failings and triumphs with work-life balance – or work-life harmony as Amazon’s Jeff Bezos now calls it - with the behavioral and social science research and data that can help us better understand what drives our human experiences, and how to change. The aim of the podcast is to create awareness and connection, open minds, provide evidence-based solutions, tools and role models, and to give hope. There are real costs with our current driven, harried, work-identified culture. We explore what it will take to transform the way we work and live, as individuals, as organizations, and as a culture, to make time for both meaningful work and fuller, healthier lives.